


A Watch With No Hands

by elle_stone



Series: A Watch With No Hands [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-06-28 10:31:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 39,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19810447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Bellamy has lived his whole life in space, in a series of 300-year old space stations known as the Ark. When an oxygen crisis sends the stations down to Earth, he flees the beginning of a military dictatorship, and discovers that his long-abandoned home planet isn't as deserted as he believed it to be.Clarke lives in peace with her people, making art that celebrates the beauty of the Earth. But a recent discovery by her best friend has opened up the possibility that the world was not always this peaceful, nor this beautiful. Wells's subsequent disappearance, the surreptitious experiments of her neighbors, and the inscrutable silence of the village's leader, all contribute to a growing sense of unease in her community. When she encounters a stranger in the woods, they give each other the answers they've each been seeking: about history, peace, trust, the Earth's violent past, and its hopeful future.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here at last: my entry for the 2019 Bellarke Big Bang!
> 
> I want to thank [anne-shirley-blythe](https://anne-shirley-blythe.tumblr.com/) for the beautiful moodboard that accompanies this fic, which you can find [here](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/186291460420/a-watch-with-no-hands-a-bellarke-au-for-the-2019).
> 
> The title of this fic is from the song _These Dreams_ by Heart, not because that song has much of anything to do with the story, but because I'm not good at titles and I was listening to a lot of 80s music at the time I picked the title.
> 
> Please note that this fic is part one in a series because I'm just Like That I guess. This part is 5 chapters long and will update on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday.

The ship crash lands in an expanse of wasted fields, long gone fallow, beneath a harsh and unforgiving sun. At the edge of the fields, large metal buildings stand brittle with rust, next to a farmhouse made of rotting wood and choked by a tangle of vines. The farmland seems to stretch an impossible distance, but by the edge of the horizon, even it has turned to forest: here the inevitable, creeping return of what was once felled and cleared by human hands. 

Bellamy sees this landscape only later, after he has picked his way over the wreckage with the others, and found his way to the door and then outside. At first, he knows nothing of where he is. He knows that he is awake, and, probably, alive. He knows that his shoulder hurts in the same way it does when he sleeps twisted up in his bed, and his limbs fall asleep beneath the heavy weight of his own body; and he knows that his head hurts; and he knows that wherever he is, it is crowded with other people, groaning through their own headaches, breathing too hard through too-thin air. He opens his eyes slowly. His eyelids seem to stick to his skin. Dust and debris have fallen in his hair and over his shoulders and arms. His arm hurts because it is half-stuck, shoved into a corner, pinned between his body and the wall of the ship. For several long moments, he focuses only on disengaging it, testing its strength and feeling, biting his lip through the sensation of pins and needles as his skin comes alive again. 

Around him: the sounds of a squashed sardine can of people, also slowly coming to life. 

What he does not hear are the sounds of the ship itself, the oxygen system, the buzz of the unreliable lights, the gentle background hum that, eternally present even in his most quiet moments, so often sounds like no noise at all. Its absence is striking. He rubs at his arm and looks up. Part of the roof has caved in and the lights are off, lending the room a shadowy and twilight-gray mood. 

The oxygen system is dead. Finally put out of its misery. The ship, too, dead and crushed in upon itself, and yet he, who has needed the ship his whole life, is still living, and that must mean they have made it to Earth. 

He pictures the space station tipped over on its side and embedded deep in the ground, smoking and dented, but the proportions of the image are entirely off. The station appears first as small as a child's toy against the vastness of the Earth, which he pictures as a limitless and undifferentiated mass of brown and green, and then, as he tries to adjust the vision, as an oversized monolith, an obscene burning scrap heap, in a beautiful but two-dimensional wilderness. Earth in his mind has long been a vague concept: some images on a screen, some words on a page—a notion he's been chasing for years but never thought he would reach, and now that he's here he feels dizzy with the possibilities, the sense that anything could be out there, on the other side of the station walls. 

Or he might have a concussion, and that's why the room feels oddly tilted on its side. 

Only a few weeks ago, when this station and its fellows still orbited the Earth, Bellamy not only thought that he would live and die in space, the eleventh generation to miss out on the chance of coming home, but that the end was coming soon. He'd narrowly escaped conviction on a charge of aiding and abetting in an Unauthorized Child case, been stripped of his position in the Guard, and demoted to janitor, where he kept the lowest profile possible and avoided surveillance wherever he thought it might lurk. He debated with himself in the middle of the night: were his quarters bugged? 

If so, whoever was listening must have been bored out of his skull. 

On the weekends, he visited his sister, the Unauthorized Child in question, in juvenile lockup. He asked her questions about how she was doing, how she was getting along with the others, as if she were away at school. As if he thought she might give him a real answer, instead of just holding his hand across the table and digging her nails into his skin. She did question him about his trial, early on. But if she suspected, as he did, that another charge might be coming, something drummed up and flimsy that would send him to the airlock for sure, she never mentioned it. 

The last time he saw her, she was even more quiet than usual, and more agitated. Instead of holding his hands, she rubbed her palms up and down her legs, drummed her fingertips on the table. Her gaze was unsettled, and he could hear the shuffle of her feet against the metal floor, quiet like the sounds that disturbed his sleep sometimes at night. Maybe she knew something he didn't. Maybe she'd heard a rumor, passed from visitor to prisoner and from prisoner to prisoner, passed like a virus, passed like a whisper of the end times coming. 

But if so, she didn't say. She let him talk, and talk; she let him kiss her cheek before he left; she let him hug her for as long as the guards would allow. He told her he'd be back in seven days, then wasn't. 

Before the week was out, the Chancellor called an assembly, and the ending he'd read in Octavia's anxious movements finally became clear. A lens clicked into focus, sharp and real as he stood in the back of the crowd, making himself invisible and listening. 

Even from where he stood, he could see that Chancellor Kane looked ill, thinner than he'd been when Bellamy was a member of the Guard, and saw him often, hollowed out around the eyes and sickly pale. A look Bellamy had seen before, mostly among the actually ill. He'd thought at first Kane would announce his own imminent death—a waste of ceremony, of so much dread anticipation—but when he spoke at last over the ripples of whispers and conversations, he brought a more universal, and that much more dire, vision of demise. The whole ship, he'd said. The whole Ark, dying. The weakened oxygen system that those on Factory, Tesla, Hydro, had been feeling now for some time, was not fixable. (Bellamy, in the back with his Factory Station neighbors, hardly stunned, shaking his head as around him, low grumbles sounded louder than any signs of shock.) Soon, the other stations would feel it, too. Soon, in a matter of days, some would have to be shut down. 

A voice cried out, angry, from the crowd: "And where will we go?" 

_Out the door?_ Bellamy wondered, and would have laughed, the inevitable come for him at last, except for the hard block of ice in his gut. He wasn’t sick for himself. Factory would not be the first to go. Prison Station, not even mentioned in the Chancellor's speech, was the most expendable. Octavia, an extra person from the start, was most expendable. 

"The only place we can go," Kane was saying. 

A hollow of silence, then, as if before he spoke, the crowd already knew. 

"To the ground." 

* 

At first, the mission—Council-speak for mad dash to safety, or perhaps toward a different sort of ruin—proceeded smoothly. Some people expressed uncertainty about Earth's survivability. _We don't know what the radiation levels there are like,_ went the rumor in the common rooms; _we haven't been in contact with the ground for over two hundred years_ , ran the macabre reminder in the cafeteria line. But most were only concerned with packing their bags, and a strange trill of optimism, almost giddy, almost mad, suffused most conversations, lightened the mood even in the most oxygen-starved sectors, buoyed even the most pessimistic hearts. 

Bellamy was dutiful, packed his bags according to the guidelines distributed to his door, planned his route to his designated escape pod according to the map in his exodus packet. Did not accost the Guards who would not answer his questions about Prison Station. Did not give in to his fears, stoked by sinister rumors, that the Ark didn't have enough dropships for everyone, that the less desirable would be culled just as the chosen launched from the main docking bays. What else could he do? Jump into his sister's cell? He would if he thought it would help. He might just anyway, futile as the gesture would inevitably be. Rather die with her than die alone. 

Forty-eight hours before launch, he woke to a set of hysterical alarms: a flashing red light in his quarters, an ear-splitting automated shriek in the hall. He stumbled outside with his hands over his ears. His neighbors were leaning in their doorways, in their rumpled pajamas and bare feet, squinting into the insane light. He had to take shallow breaths. His head pounded, from the noise and the lights and the thin, near-useless air. 

Then the stomp of heavy boot soles at the end of the hall, the appearance of a handful of monstrous black figures, weapons drawn and oxygen masks over their noses: the Guard, who corralled them together and lead them to cafeteria. The blare of the alarm was quieter there, and the air had the hazy feel of barely-dissipated smoke. Slumped into chairs and against the wall and on the floor, they watched the Chancellor on a crackling video feed from Go-Sci, while doctors in their blue coats gave oxygen to the young and the sick. A small kindness, Bellamy thought, as he pictured Octavia, huddled in the corner of her cell. Her uneven, panicked breathing. A small kindness like a last plea for mercy at the end. 

A small coup, the Chancellor explained, made up mostly of Section Seventeen workers from Factory and Tesla, had taken the escape pods and short-circuited the dropships. They'd been under the impression that this was their only means of escape. (No word on whether they were paranoid or correct, Bellamy noted, which he took as an admission of guilt.) The sudden evacuation had left the rest of the Ark compromised. Their oxygen would run out in less than twenty-four hours. The ship’s engineers were exploring possible alternatives. Whether they were optimistic about those possibilities or not, Bellamy didn’t know, because the shaky feed snapped out, mid-sentence—a bad omen of the future closing in. 

How he escaped from that moment, in which a calm acceptance had warred with a desperate survival instinct, in which his brain had run on overdrive, searching out possibilities, ways to get to Octavia if nothing else, while his body sat utterly still, his heart barely seeming to beat—he doesn't entirely know. The memories formed only in indistinct bits through his panic. Which is funny, as he had not believed himself to be panicked at the time. He recalls waiting hours that seemed like eternities, not knowing the time, because the circadian lights were broken and only the emergency lights remained on. Thinking about how time itself was so fragile on the Ark, with its artificial days, its sunlamps running on power culled only painstakingly from the real sun. Listening to the rhythmic murmur of voices around him, people crying but so softly, the sound seemed a part of the ship-sound itself. Noting how the ship hum seemed quieter, too, wondering if the end would come slowly and gently, a growing drowsiness he could not shake, a slipping, a sliding away into nothing. 

When the Guards returned, thick stomping boots shaking the floor, rousing the weary, even this shock seemed to resonate from a great distance: oxygen deprivation perhaps, making even the most rebellious of them pliant, a dazed and drugged populace easily regrouped and rearranged. They were separated by Station, no explanation given. None requested. Then some were moved from one group to another, an inscrutable sorting by inscrutable blank faces, issuing short commands without context. Bellamy hardly fought when he was pushed over to the Alpha Station group. He felt more a jumble of parts than a full human, and if he were so treated, he could hardly complain. 

He heard the audio over the shipwide channel as he was marched to the Alpha common room, crackling as the video message had done, fading in and out but enough, at least, for him to get the gist. The dropships were gone, so the stations would be dropships. They'd separate from each other on their way through the atmosphere, and if the Ark was lucky, most of its constituent parts would make it safely to the ground, and the different groups would find each other again there. 

A suicidal plan if ever he'd heard one, but then, he hadn't liked the idea of a quiet dip into oblivion anyway. 

Somewhere on the way down, a trip he does not remember at all, he lost consciousness. 

Now, around him, the most impatient and least trapped of the Alpha population are starting to rise to their feet. 

* 

Bellamy finds himself at last at the back of a crowd, which is jostling against the door that used to lead out to Go-Sci. Now it leads, simply, _out_. Even the thought of being so close to the fresh, clear, real air of Earth and the springy brown soil and, perhaps, the trees, beneath the blue of the sky, makes him bounce on the balls of his feet, strain up on his toes to try to see what is happening at the front of the throng. But there are too many people, all as impatient as he. What could possibly be taking so long? 

Maybe the door is stuck. Maybe, without power, it won't open, and they'll be trapped inside, slowly suffocating to death on Earth just as they would have slowly suffocated in space. Which is ironic, maybe, or just tragic, or even outright funny in a sick sort of way. He remembers again the way the roof was caved in above him when he woke: perhaps an escape route there, or somewhere else, somewhere the ship is broken and they could try to fight their way through— 

Or maybe the people at the front are worried about radiation, debating among themselves who should risk a walk outside first. The air could be toxic out there, after all, blah blah blah and similar concerns. They're being absolute idiots, if that's the cause of the hold-up. Radiation or suffocation, that's the choice, and Bellamy didn't come to Earth just to die in a tin can. 

"Just tear it down!" a voice from somewhere slightly ahead of him calls out, and he can't help but grin. _Someone_ here has the right idea, at least. 

He’s so excited by the hint of some action at last, a riot if necessary, that he brings his hands up to his mouth like a bullhorn and shouts out, “Yeah! Take it down!” Others around him yell out similar encouragements—“Open it!” “Destroy it!” “Let us go!”—and a few fists punch up into the air like threats. 

Next to him, a young Guard, oxygen mask gone now, hair still sticking up in back as if he'd just pulled it off his face, is staring at Bellamy, eyes narrowed and suspicious. He looks away when Bellamy meets his eye, but not immediately. Not as if he were scared or embarrassed, but as if Bellamy were dirt muddying up the sole of his shoe. Bellamy can’t tell if the look was one of recognition, or confusion, or just plain old spite: probable rabble rouser spotted, potential instigator of violence targeted for future surveillance. 

But they’re on Earth now, so watch him not give a fuck. 

Anyway, what that Guard should be doing is his job, because the crowd is growing more restless, the barely restrained violence of it starting to crest. A sway of bodies around and behind him tries to push him forward, forward only toward the still-locked barrier of the door. Maybe this new recruit doesn’t understand what’s going on, but to Bellamy, it’s like crystal: a slow crushing, a vice-grip of limbs against limbs, a different sort of suffocation. 

So he takes a deep breath, cups his hands around his mouth again and yells, even louder, "What's the hold up? Open the damn door!" 

He's shoved again, harder this time, with an elbow in his gut, as the crowd parts to make room for a tall figure striding through. Her progress is easy to follow: another Guard, all in black and making her way toward the door as quickly as she can through the mass of people, and with as little regard as possible for their existence, even as it slows her down. Her voice rings out above their heads: "Do not open that door until the Chancellor—" 

Bellamy recognizes the voice as that of Major Byrne. She is a formidable figure among the Ark Guard but still no match for the pressure, the insistence, of the people yearning to come home. Despite her warning, someone at the front finally forces the heavy metal slab open, and a bright rush of sunlight and oxygen fills the narrow, stifling space. 

For one short moment, Bellamy cannot move. He is dazed by the light, by the unnamable scent of the air. 

But the crowd around him will not let him get his bearings, nor even take in a proper breath. It is forcing him forward, marching him toward the entrance, from which the Alpha population is spilling out like water through a broken dam. 

Somehow, then, he has jumped off from the lip of the doorway and onto the ground. 

The ground at last, like a disorienting dream, perhaps a beauty beyond dreams, and yet at first he cannot take it in. The light is too intense, too omnipresent: it seems not to emanate from the sun above but from the air itself, from all around him, so that he cannot turn away from it but must close his eyes against the glare. Thus his first impression of Earth is not the sight of it but the feel of it, the smell of it, the sounds of it. The strange scent he first noticed when the door opened is stronger here, and he scrambles for words that might describe it. _Clear_ , he thinks wildly. _Sharp_. _Pure_. _Fresh_ , maybe, is the best one. _Exhilarating_. He pulls it deep into his lungs. His skin has started to prick with heat, perhaps again from that insanely bright sun, and he unzips his jacket roughly. But he forces himself not to pull it off entirely and throw it to the ground, because he knows it won’t last five minutes among the horde. 

He hears their excited cries all around him, the crowd now dispersed and running free, shouts of joy and wide gasps of awe, the metallic thump of more footsteps running down the hall toward the door, the thick thud of boots against dirt. Yes, _dirt_ beneath him. He tests it out, rocking back and forth on his feet. The soles of his shoes sink slightly into the earth, and when he tries to take a step, eyes still closed, he feels the way the soil clings to him, an unfamiliar gravity clawing. 

Slowly, he blinks his eyes open again. 

There is a group of people dancing a circle in front of him. To his right, two more cling to each other, hugging and rocking back and forth. 

Behind him towers the hulking mass of the ship, almost as he'd imagined it, but more obscene, a great metallic scar upon the Earth. A thick plume of gray smoke emanates from behind the busted Alpha Station Arch, and the large rectangle of the main station has become lopsided, tilted where it hit the ground, dented and broken from impact. 

Behind him, the remains of the ship, the smoking crash site, and all around him, on every side, a flat plain, wild with long grass and flowers. He catches sight of the buildings in the distance, and remembers, no more than a second’s flash of an image in his mind, a picture from the Ark photo archives: neatly tilled fields, a square white house with a porch and cheery windows in the front, a large circular building for the storing of...what was it? Grain? 

In this way, he understands that they have landed in what was once a farm. But the pictures in the archive were so tiny, just little squares on his tablet screen, and most of his reading described farms as small, family-driven affairs. He'd never thought the word could connote such a large, such an impossibly immense space. Staring out toward the horizon makes him dizzy. Except for the manic energy of the crash survivors, the landscape is so utterly still. The air feels thick, burdened with thick and undisturbed heat—another remnant of the war? The reverberations of their destruction, still? He pushes his sleeves up as far as they will go, still itching to throw his jacket off and _breathe_. 

Is the whole planet this quiet, this empty? Are they the only survivors? 

A reasonable question, but he doubts that anyone else is asking it just yet. A few people are standing as if stunned, open-mouthed in awe, but most have thrown themselves fully into celebration. A group of children has started up a game of tag, and even some of the adults are running, jogging around almost in circles, no clear goal in mind but breathless and excited and caught up in the wonder of the land, the bright daze of the sun. 

Major Byrne does not seem pleased. She's hiked out farther than anyone else, maybe fifty feet out from the door, turning to look from one uncontrollable person to the next with the sort of stifled, staccato movements that make Bellamy dizzy even to observe. She tries calling out a few times—"Hey!" and "Stop!"—the commands as short and useless as the pivoting motion of her heels, but no one is listening. 

"SETTLE DOWN!" she yells, at last, with ear-splitting force, and most of those outside pause in their revelries, shocked, as if noticing her presence among them for the first time. 

"Settle down," she repeats, this time a sharp, strident threat. Bellamy feels his spine straighten and his hands ball into fists. "We need to stay organized. Has anyone seen the Chancellor?" 

Judging from the silence, no one has. 

Then: 

"Organized?" 

A voice, incredulous and manic, a shot fired through the dispersed crowd. Bellamy thinks it might belong to the instigator of the almost-riot at the door, who he sees now is a young man, barely more than a kid, who had just a moment before been dancing in a loose and off-kilter way with a girl about his age. He drops her hands now, steps away from her and closer to Byrne. 

"You want us to be _organized_?” he continues. “You want us to just stand in a nice straight line and wait for the Chancellor to show up when we're on _Earth_? Frickin'— ** _Earth_**?" 

He's stepping closer and closer, and Bellamy notices, his own jaw tight, how Bryne has reached for her weapon. 

"I don't know about you, but _I_ am going to celebrate! I'm going to do whatever I want and go wherever I want! I'm going to run through this whole field if I want to, just watch me!" And just like that— 

_He must be fucking high_ , Bellamy thinks, but the thought is distant and emotionless, as if he were watching himself, from a faraway spot, watching this fool kid. 

—he's setting off—sprinting like he actually has a destination in mind, maybe the tree line or the horizon—until Byrne cuts him off at the knees with a single swipe of her shock baton, and the kid topples gracelessly to the ground. 

A part of Bellamy knew she would do it. Another part of him can't _believe_ she did, and it's this part that stands frozen in the middle of the field, with the others, watching for an interminable handful of seconds as the kid rolls on the ground, clutching his knee and groaning. Bellamy wishes, even as it is happening, that he were the one to break: to yell, to counter, to fight. 

But he’s not. 

Instead, the stunned silence is broken by an outraged voice from behind them: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” shouted from the entrance of the ship. Bellamy turns abruptly toward the source, and sees a doctor, still holding on to the doorway as if he'd only just that second skidded to a dead halt at the end of the hall. He is staring at Major Byrne and seething. 

She looks unconcerned. "I am keeping order in a group that was devolving into chaos," she answers, even as the doctor strides toward her. His blue medical jacket flails out behind him. Bellamy is surprised not to see trails of steam flaring from his nostrils. 

"Do you have any idea—?" He cuts himself off, then throws his arm back toward the ship, his eyes still on her. "We have _actual_ _injured_ in there. Actual wounded. The crash started a fire in medical, and we are trying to limit that damage and _you_ are out here... creating more casualties? How dare you?" 

The doctor's anger has broken Bellamy and a few of the others out of their stupor, and they slowly approach the scene, one woman already kneeling down to help the injured boy. 

"He'll be fine," Byrne says, without a glance to him. She does flick her eyes briefly toward the ship, and Bellamy, on the ground on the boy's other side now, helping him try to stand, thinks he senses the slightest bit of concern in that look. "How bad is the fire? How many injured? Any deaths?" 

The doctor's eyes are narrowed. "That's a report for the Chancellor. And since _he's_ not dead, I'll be making it to him." 

"Hey, ah—" Bellamy falters a moment under the kid's lopsided weight. They’ve gotten him into a sitting position, at least, but every movement of his leg seems to pain him; he winces and takes in a sharp breath. "I hate to interrupt, Dr.—" A glance at the name sewn into the jacket—"Jackson. But maybe you could take a look at this?" 

Jackson snaps his gaze down, and as soon as he catches sight of the kid, the expression on his face softens, as if a spell has been broken. Looking at that face, Bellamy gets an idea of what he must have been like in his old life on the Ark: compassionate, gentle, perhaps even uncommonly kind. He doesn't give Byrne a second glance, but drops down to his knees in the grass. "Right, of course," he mumbles, and "Don't worry, I've got you," as he reaches out to test the state of the injured knee. The kid tenses beneath the touch. He's holding the edge of Bellamy's jacket in a tightly closed fist, still sucking in air through gritted teeth. 

Byrne, for her part, pays them no attention. She's focused instead on the newest arrival from the Alpha Station depths: Chancellor Kane, who is jumping down out of the ship and taking in the chaos even more than he is taking in the sight of the Earth. His brow is furrowed, and in the hard light of the sun, Bellamy sees clearly the true pallor of his face. 

"What the hell is going on here?" he shouts, so loudly that everyone in the crowd jumps. The movement is brief, no more than a shiver through them, as if they were objects upon a table and Kane had just banged his fists upon the top. After, they are as still as objects, as tiny statues in the endless, overgrown field. 

No one answers for a long, tense moment. 

Then one man from the far edge, pointing: "Major Byrne tried to cripple that kid!" 

Kane's frown deepens as he takes a longer look at the injured boy, Bellamy and the woman on his other side, Dr. Jackson now pushing his pant leg up, searching out bruises and spots of particular pain. And Byrne, standing above them, staring the Chancellor down, evincing no remorse. 

She does ask, "Are you all right, Sir?" which seems to Bellamy to be a question far and away beside the point. 

He waves it off. "I'm fine. Unlike some of our people in there—" 

Then he cuts off his own words, his arm still gesturing back toward the ship, either because his voice sounded too harried or because he fears that he has given away too much. Bellamy would guess some combination of the two. The good mood of their first moments on the ground has long shattered, and now there is only the question of what will take its place: violence, rebellion, submission, a sort of collective nausea, a paralyzing and contagious fear? 

Clearly, Kane is turning the same question over in his mind. Bellamy glances between him and Byrne, counting out the seconds of their staring match. 

Kane breaks first, not to cede any ground, but to take back the crowd from her. He steps back, clearly a little shaky on his feet, uncertain of the shape of the ground or still dazed from the scene inside, Bellamy's not sure, until he can address the whole assembly as one. 

"Citizens," he starts, with admirable force and clarity. He waits a long moment, and his eyes search out every face in turn. Even Jackson has paused in his work and turned his gaze up to him. "We are on Earth!" He smiles, a wide though weary smile, and throws his arms wide. "We have made it home. We're alive, and we should be proud. We should be hopeful for the future." 

Being hopeful, Bellamy thinks, is easier said than done, especially now that he's getting a sense of what his new home is going to be like. Not so different, perhaps, from his old one. 

"I'm going to be honest with you," Kane continues. 

And ah—there it is. 

"This next adventure will not be easy. When our dropships and escape pods were stolen, so were most of the food and supplies we had stored there. We have no tents, little food, none of the survival kits our Earth Skills experts put together for the return generation's use. This makes the transition to our new life here that much more difficult. But we can still come to thrive here in our new home if we stick together, if we are patient and kind to each other, if we work hard to make the ground habitable again." 

A part of Bellamy truly believes that Kane believes in what he's saying. He is the son of the Tender of the Tree on the Ark, after all; he grew up an Earth worshipper, a nature acolyte. And though he matured into something else—the uncompromising head of the Ark judicial system, making no excuses, bending no rules—still a certain softness, or at least the faint impression of it, has always lurked beneath. 

Like how, after Bellamy’s mother was executed, and he was stripped of his rank in the Guard, Kane briefly squeezed his shoulder so hard that it hurt, an expression on his face that would have read as guilty, if he’d only met Bellamy’s eye. 

On the other hand, some of his speech rings clearly of propaganda. _Work hard and be patient._ Sounds a lot like _do what we say and trust your misery will eventually ease_. 

"Our first priority," he continues, "is to treat our injured. Then we will make sure that everyone has somewhere to sleep tonight—in the Ark." A few groans at this, muted protests, but he carries on. " _In the Ark_ , where we know we will be safe and everyone accounted for. Remember that we do not know anything about this area: what animals live here, what other potential threats may exist. Tomorrow, we will send out a team composed of Earth Skills experts and members of the Guard to scout our surroundings and begin searching for food. When we’re ready, we will go looking for the other stations. I promise," he adds, "we will get through this. We will meet our challenges together and we will prosper." 

Bellamy glances down, sees the purple bruises that are already forming a mottled ring around the boy's knee. He does not feel filled with optimism. 

* 

Bellamy sleeps only fitfully through his first night on Earth. 

He's been assigned the sofa in a three-person family unit, now crowded with young men, two of whom snore. That, he could probably manage: the steady rhythm of it is, at least, an antidote to the unnatural quiet, which has descended upon the ship in the absence of the oxygen generators and which is so much more noticeable now that the sun has gone down. Worse than the ragged breathing of his roommates are the noises he hears coming from the other side of the wall. From the outside. Earth sounds, mysterious and foreign. 

He'd always imagined a certain peaceful, beautiful silence would reign on the ground. 

Now he's twisting about on the couch, a residual soreness in his arm, a tension in his neck, trying to keep himself calm. But the night is filled with intermittent bumps and rustlings. Perhaps the noises of animals. Perhaps the noises of people. He pictures swift, thin, threatening shapes in the dark. 

He is not well-rested when the sun finally rises and the others start to wake, but that doesn’t matter. Guards are thumping through the halls, rousing each room. The sun is seeping in, painfully bright, around the edges of the window that used to look out only on the stars. 

The survivors, sleep-bleary and confused in the morning, are gathered outside, counted off by the Guards, and then divided into teams and set to work. Bellamy's shoved back into the ship to clear out the trashed Alpha common room. Over his shoulder, he sees a group of six people, three Guards and three civilians, huddling together, one of them pointing out toward the buildings at the edge of the old farm. About to set off. Bellamy's legs cramp as if with long disuse, aching to join them. 

A routine quickly asserts itself, almost as stifling as life on the old Ark had been. Every day, a different task: sometimes sorting through debris, sometimes taking inventory, sometimes helping in medical, where the badly injured are recovering. Sometimes doing tasks so pointless they can only be described as busy work, meant to keep him tired, meant to stave off restlessness. Every day, a scouting party sent out in the morning, returning in the evening with bags of nuts, mushrooms, berries, which the Guards distribute evenly among the ravenous, impatient populace. This food of the Earth tastes uncommonly sharp, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter. The nuts and the seeds from the berries get stuck in his teeth, where he worries at them through the night, whenever an unusual sound wakes him and he cannot fall back asleep. He cannot be ungrateful for the odd, chewy mushrooms or the red juice from the bright, round berries that he picks one by one out of his palm, and yet, sometimes he wonders. The Guards have guns. Why do they never bring back any meat? 

Do animals no longer exist on the Earth? And if so, what creatures make the noises that Bellamy hears in the dark? 

He spends as much of each day outside as he can, watching the sun move slowly across the bright, cloudless sky, sweating in the hot air. This heat seems to shimmer around him, sometimes, in what he now understands is the middle of the day. He wipes at his forehead with the back of his hand, watches the Guards patrol the arbitrary perimeter at the edge of their camp. Guns drawn. Waiting for someone to be stupid enough to try to run. 

No one runs but the need to dig one's heel into the dirt and then just set off, in a dead sprint, comes out unexpectedly and often, in various other forms. Arguments in the food line and shoulders shoved against shoulders in the hallways. A fight or near-fight several times every day. One of Bellamy's roommates walks around with a black eye and a split lip, and the air in Alpha Station crackles with violence, barely contained. 

One day, a young woman even tries to attack Chancellor Kane, sneaking up behind him while he's talking to one of his inscrutable Earth Skills experts. She gets him in a headlock before Major Byrne pulls her off, but even then she's still yelling: "I'm from Farm! I'm from Farm, you idiots! I need to find my parents! Why aren't we looking for my fucking parents?" 

By the end, the words dissolve mostly into sobs and battered breaths, as Major Byrne wrestles her down into the dirt, hands pinned behind her and knee against her back, but Bellamy's oddly proud of her anyway. She got pretty far. And Kane has a convincing look of pity on his face, even though it takes him a solid minute before he orders Byrne to let the poor girl up. 

"Now that," Bellamy's roommate says, later, over dinner, "that took guts, what that girl did. Real guts." He touches the slow-healing wound on his lip absently, while Bellamy breaks open a nut with his back teeth. They're sitting in the grass with their backs up against the side of the station, watching the psychedelic colors of the sky at the end of the day. 

"People keep doing shit like that," Bellamy answers, "and they'll convert one of the rooms into a prison." 

The roommate laughs, as if this were a joke, and then knocks his arm against Bellamy's and says, "Hey. I know you're Factory, too. I've seen you around." 

_Seen me where? Mopping the floors?_

"Mmm," Bellamy answers, noncommittal. 

"Yeah. So. We know what that girl's talking about. I mean, my parents are dead. But I have friends on Factory, and Tesla, and Hydro. I want to know, you know, if they made it." His voice has taken on a low and confessional tone, almost sad in the way the fading color of the sky is sad, and Bellamy doesn't know what he's supposed to say. He looks down at the sorry assortment of nuts and berries still left in his lap. 

"Anyway," the roommate continues, a gruff edge to the word, the moment of confession over—Bellamy thinks he mostly just wants to talk, and it doesn't matter who's listening. He'd try to be comforting, but he doesn't want to give too much of himself away. "Anyway, we're all getting the short end here, you know? Us non-Alpha people." 

"What do you mean?" 

"I mean we get the shittier jobs. I bet we're getting fewer rations, too." He shoves a small handful of berries into his mouth, and doesn't wait to chew and swallow before he goes on. "You know why they brought us." 

"To balance out the number of people on each station." 

The roommate snorts. Bellamy wonders if he's one of the snorers. "Because we're expendable. Just like we were up there." He nods up toward the sky, where the first hints of stars are now visible in the deepening blue. 

"Look," Bellamy says, not because he disagrees, but because he doesn't need this guy doing anything stupid, too. He doesn't need to be guilty by association, doesn’t need any extra attention coming his way. Survival comes from keeping a low profile, on the new Ark just like on the old one. "I don't think we get the worst jobs. All the jobs are shitty." 

"Yeah? What about hers?" He points his chin in the direction of Byrne, whose attempt at a casual patrol has brought her almost to the ship, almost to them. "De facto Chancellor doesn't look too shitty to me. You know she loves ruling with an iron fist." 

"Sure," Bellamy agrees, his voice light but quiet, so she won't think to look toward them. "But that's not her job. That's _her_. You know she'd rule with an iron fist even if she were a janitor." 

The other guy laughs, a sharp bark, and Byrne's head snaps toward them. They smile at her and quickly turn away. 

* 

"If this tension doesn't break, we'll have a riot on our hands." 

Bellamy, crouching down behind the scrap heap that is forming beyond Alpha Station, runs his hand over his face. He settles his palm over his mouth, as if to hide the inappropriate, traitorous smile forming there. Though in a way, it is funny: three people, two unaware of the third, all in a twisted agreement with each other. Two of them arguing, one hiding and waiting and listening, his heart in his throat. 

"I agree," Byrne is saying. Unlike Kane, who sounds desperate and urgent, she seems nearly imperious and perfectly calm. "We're losing control of them— _you're_ losing control, Sir. On the Ark, we had consequences. Here—" 

"Here we have the threat of constant violence. That won't help anyone. We're creating a world just as...as painful and as difficult and as small as what we grew up in. Haven't you ever wanted more than that?" 

Bellamy's eyes flutter briefly closed. He feels almost sympathetic, hearing that hint of yearning in the Chancellor's voice. 

"What either of us wants is irrelevant," Byrne answers. "What we need is security. When we have that, then we can deal with the rest of it." 

Her voice is clipped, unemotional: Kane's vague utopian vision, reduced so simply to 'the rest of it.' Does this make him angry? Bellamy tries to picture his face but comes up blank. 

"Security, yes, fine. But what you're building is an atmosphere of terror and uncertainty and people will rebel against that. We need to be honest with them—" 

"Being honest will cause a riot, without question. And being lax will cause a mass exodus. Nothing but my Guards keeps our entire population from fleeing into those woods in search of the other stations, and you know that. Sir." 

For a moment, he hears nothing, which seems to dig deeper the hollow of silence before she remembered the word _Sir_. Bellamy feels a sick satisfaction at this dissension in the upper ranks. But beneath that, like a deep pool of nausea spreading farther and farther, spreading all the way through him, he’s afraid. Byrne was the highest-ranking Guard on Alpha when it came down. She controls the Guard, utterly. If she and Kane were to war, she would win. 

"What I know," Kane is saying, his voice so low that Bellamy strains to hear it, and shot through with painful, confessional honesty, "is that they aren't wrong to want to reunite with their family and friends. Finding the other Stations is one of our top priorities. I'm their Chancellor too." 

"Respectfully, Sir," Byrne answers, with a surprising degree of actual respect to her tone, "I wouldn't say that's still true. You need to protect your people on Alpha, first and foremost. We don't know what's out there. Maybe the other stations. Maybe not." Her voice drops lower, taking on a more secretive tone. "I don't need to remind you that the members of the attempted coup had a significant stash of weaponry on their dropships." 

Bellamy's stomach sinks. A bead of sweat trickles down past his temple, and he can feel the unpleasant stick of sweat against his palms. The threat of the breakaway faction somewhere out there in the woods matters little to him, matters little, he imagines, to most people in the Alpha Station camp. But clearly—and this is what worries him—it matters a great deal to Major Byrne. 

"We cannot live the rest of our lives in fear of Diana Sydney and her people," Kane says, and Bellamy feels a flicker of respect at the conviction in his voice. 

"Based on their launch times, they landed in this hemisphere—" 

"That's half the world, Byrne!" Kane hisses. "We can’t even place _ourselves_ on our old maps. They could be hundreds of miles away. They could be dead. We're not exactly defenseless and we know— _you_ know—that the people we're most likely to find out there are the survivors from the other stations." He pauses, and Bellamy can hear the hard strain of his breath. Then, quiet but insistent: "We aren't the only ones." 

_Aren't we?_

_How would they know?_

He should be excited at the thought but, without ever thinking it in so many words, he had long ago assumed the other stations were gone. That they were, if not destroyed, at least permanently lost, that in the great never-ending expanse of the world they were no more than wreckage in the distance. And even if there were survivors, the only person in existence he truly cares about is Octavia, and Prison Station probably wasn't even sent down. She's probably already suffocated, and he feels a stab of guilt that he ever let himself get corralled onto Alpha in the first place, leaving her as he'd once sworn he never would. 

He takes in a shaky breath, willing himself to stay quiet, almost chokes when he hears Byrne speak. 

"Sir, that signal is being sent from Prison Station. It's faint, we know only that it's coming from somewhere to the north, and it's the only one we've been able to pick up—" 

"We only got our equipment working again two days ago—" 

"And it would be irresponsible to send a team out to look for a group of juvenile offenders." A pause, Bellamy's heart pounding in his throat, so hard that it hurts. "I cannot allow my Guards to be used for that purpose." 

Prison Station. Prison Station sending out signals. Do they know they're sending messages, or is the station itself programmed to automatically emit digital flares? Are there survivors? Could Octavia be one? 

Nothing else matters but these questions swirling around and around in his head. The argument between the Chancellor and Byrne: only static. He closes his eyes; he stays very still. 

Bellamy was never the best Earth Skills student, but he wasn't the worst, and he trusts himself to survive out there on his own out of sheer stupid determination, if that's what it takes. He trusts himself more than he trusts Byrne, or Kane, or the Guards, or the Earth Skills experts and their slow, cautious mapping of the terrain. And even if he fails, if he never finds her, or if she cannot be found, at least he can die knowing he'd tried. That would be a more honorable fate than withering away at the Alpha Station camp, waiting to be taken out by a riot, or arrested by Byrne, or set to work building the wall that she is rumored to so badly want. 

That night he grabs a few supplies: whatever food he can scrounge and stick in his pockets, a canteen of water, a stolen knife. It’s not much, but it will have to do. Taking a gun is too risky, a decision he hopes he does not come to regret. He sneaks out past the unwatchful eye of a bleary night patrol Guard, using the ship itself for cover before he breaks away in the direction of the farmhouse, and the trees beyond. He has no plan. Only to go north. But at least, for the first time since they landed, for perhaps the first time in his whole life, he feels free. 


	2. Chapter 2

From below, wafting through the window sometimes sharp and loud, sometimes distant and slight: the shouts and laughter of children running, playing their secret games, darting about through the trees. Even with her eyes closed, even trying to let go of every sense and every feeling and start clean, Clarke can hear them. She finds herself following the sound as if it were a melody. The high pitch of excitement, the low huff of laughter from out of breath lungs. If only she could follow it all the way down through the leaves, and down through time. She chases after it with longing: those little scraps of joyous sound calling out to her.

Not what she was intending at all, to get so caught up in their inscrutable play; to find herself remembering her own younger days, easy and happy when classes broke for the first weeks of summer, when they basked in the new season; to find herself remembering playing tag at the forest edge. How she avoided the clearings, taking sharp turns around trees, crouching in the moss to hide if the others got too close, jumping over old, dead, hollow logs, brazen and fearless. She liked being chased more than chasing. When Wells caught her, he would be first triumphant, and then almost guilty. But only for a second, before her own expression shifted to one of sneaky determination, and he had to take off running on his own.

Those memories are not what she wants now, but at least she has relaxed her grip on her graphite stick a little, enough to feel a belated ache in her fingers, enough to lessen the chance that she will accidentally snap the thing in two.

Luna says that the best way to break through an artistic block is to strip away all one's tension, everything that impedes the free flow of inspiration through one's mind and one's hands. Build back feeling according to need. What most needs to be expressed? What most cries out for creation?

Clarke doesn't know what any of this means, but for days now she's been doing nothing but ripping apart ruined pages, burning them at night in the main bonfire as she holds her arms across her stomach like she's holding in her insides themselves—another sense of being stripped away, but not in the way that Luna probably means. Stripped away as in stripped down as in gutted. An ugly feeling, a disgusting taste in her mouth. To break through this impasse, she is willing to try almost anything, even advice that sounds more like spoken-word poetry than instruction.

 _Maybe this_ is what you need , Wells might tell her, because he is always like that: cautioning against speed, advocating the careful taking of time. His own work was never rushed . T hat was the secret to the beauty that others called precision . Clarke can feel it all around her, in the house that he built. She can feel it in the sunlight and the heavy, warm air as it rises: Wells, or her vision or her memory of him, speaking to her calmly, a voice of reason from the distances. Maybe you need to feel gutted. Even the Earth takes its rest. Don’t mistake winter for spring . 

Sure. Easy.

Snap your fingers and stop feeling sad.

She exhales hard and lets her head fall back against the wall behind her bed, keeps her eyes closed but lets herself feel every inch of the sun, streaming in through the windows, against her skin. Lets her toes curl against the fabric of her quilt. Lets her fingers explore the imperfections of the notebook paper she still has propped up against her knees. Every sensation a distraction. This art block is not itself the burden, she thinks, a quiet revelation as she slowly opens her eyes again. Ahead of her, she sees her work table, which is scattered with half-finished projects, surrounded by a flurry of vague sketches and scraps of ideas pinned up on the walls. Then the windows and the still-life vision of tree leaves beyond, immobile in the summer air, semi-translucent and colored in shifting shades of bright green and near-yellow by the noonday sun. She's been trying to sketch the bunch of flowers on her bedside table, experimenting with an abstract style that is new for her, and which does not come easily, so that the flowers on the page in front of her resemble not so much the plants themselves but blocks of yellow underpinned with charcoal outlines, a little too square, and utterly uncertain of themselves. They have nothing on those simple slight curves of green—

She rips out this page, too, crumples it into a ball and throws it to the far side of the room.

What causes that sick feeling at the end of the day is not that she cannot create but that she cannot do anything. She is powerless. And to be powerless is the most wretched and most terrifying feeling in the world.

She throws her notebook to the end of the bed, where only the baseboard keeps it from sliding right past the edge and to the floor, and hauls herself to her feet. Her whole body feels heavy from sitting too long in one position, crunched up and statue-still and waiting for some spark of inspiration to come, and which she sees now will not come. She spends several long minutes stretching, then pulls her shoes out from under the bed. Nothing to be gained in self-pity, after all. Nothing to be gained in wishful thinking and wallowing. 

She pulls open the trapdoor and climbs down through it, onto the rope ladder, lets her eyes flicker shut for a moment as she imagines herself simply falling, falling from the sky down to the ground—a little ritual she always follows, just before she slides the door back into place above her. Two little girls are playing on the swing attached to the largest branch of her tree; Clarke waves to them as she makes her way down, and they wave back, the little girl on the swing soaring high just as Clarke jumps past the last ladder rung and to the ground.

Clarke's house is one of only three in the clearing, which is small, and sits at the edge of the village. The other two are settled safely into the dirt, and from the window just above her door she can look down as if watching over them, one to her left and one to her right, reliable and secure, the little family she has chosen for herself. 

Wells's house is perfectly square, two stories high with a delicately slanted roof on top, and surrounded on three sides by a chaotic profusion of wildflowers in yellow and purple and blue. His workshop is in the back, in the scrap of space between the house itself and the clearing's edge. Clarke almost never walks back there anymore. For over a month now, the house has sat empty, and the half-finished projects still waiting there, covered by thick pieces of fabric against the threat of rain, look too forlorn, look too much like the broken promise of his eventual return.

The house on her left is also two stories high, but rectangular, and with its second story smaller than its first, allowing for a wide upper balcony on all four sides. Outside and directly in front is another workspace. This one is more brazen in its unruly clutter, although currently it is dominated by one recently completed piece.

Clarke stops and stands in front of it, tilting her head back, slowly taking it in.

The sculpture, a long wooden column topped with a series of metal discs, stands nearly nine feet tall. From the discs, metal strands of various thickness, some smooth, some notched, some twisted, curl like vines around the column, seeming at last to disappear into the Earth. Like most of Lincoln's creations, the meaning of the work does not immediately make itself clear, and yet Clarke cannot stop examining it, her eyes alighting again and again upon unforeseen details: careful scratches in the metal, beautiful imperfections in the wood.

"It posits that we are the aliens on Earth."

The voice, sudden and alighting from above, makes Clarke jump, her heartbeat skipping and then reasserting itself painfully against her throat. She tilts her head back and sets her hands on her hips. Lincoln is leaning forward over the railing of his balcony, watching her.

"We're the aliens," she repeats, a slight, incredulous lilt to her words. She looks at the sculpture, then back to him. "I can't say I follow your logic."

"We—" He starts, then cuts himself off, holds up a finger, and disappears again into the house. He reappears a minute later, skipping down the steps from the front door. "We're the metal," he picks up, reaching up to trace one of the strips of gray as it twirls around the wood. "Foreign, unexpected, twining together with the Earth for so long that we imagine ourselves to be of it, part of it." He gestures down to the column’s base. “That we imagine ourselves, even, originating from the same source.”

Clarke's eyebrows lift, and she crosses her arms against her chest, quietly considering. "Okay," she says, lightly, at last. "Novel idea. But if we were aliens, wouldn't we know? And if we're not from here, where are we from?"

To her, the theory is interesting nonsense to the same degree as every other theory flitting and whispering through the village. Low, scared murmurs among the people are inevitable, when confronted with the unknown, everyone self-conscripted to address a sudden and cryptic mystery. Clarke has an interest in that mystery herself, but it is an interest that cannot be quenched by origin stories, by deep-history excavations, by aliens or ghosts or time warps or any other vague, dreamlike hypotheses. The stories are trying to answer a why, and Clarke is focused on a what next? If she could explain this, she might be able to answer the look on Lincoln's face, which is creased with thoughts just beyond his own ability to express.

"Clarke," he says, at last, and her name sounds urgent, spoken in a low, secret-sharing tone. "The existence of the ruins mean something has been forgotten. Maybe aliens built them. But then we've forgotten that other beings used to live with us. Or maybe—what I’m saying is—maybe Earth people built them, before we even arrived."

"Maybe," she concedes. She hooks one finger around the closest metal strand; it burns hot from the sun, feels smooth and pleasant despite that, against her skin. "But even if so, we've lived here this long—aren't we Earth people now, in any way that counts?"

The supposition that they may not themselves be of the Earth, rightful guardians and protectors of it, heirs to it, will be controversial in the village. To Clarke, there is no insult in the idea, only a lack of truth. But Lincoln has always been fond of fantastical notions. Through his art, he fashions himself again and again as a teller of impossible myths.

"Aren't you ever curious,” he asks, “about what we don't remember?"

"No. I'm curious about—" She cuts herself off with a deep inhale. Curious is not the right word. Curiosity is light and roving, unrestrained, and incapable of restraint. What she feels is tight-focused and specific and gnawing, something closer to a need, a void of ignorance that begs to be filled. "I want to know—"

She catches Lincoln's gaze flicking, for a moment, over her shoulder. 

"You want to know what happened to Wells."

"Yes.” She has to pause a moment, too many emotions threatening, all at once. But she keeps her voice steady. “I want to know where he is."

"You know we've searched the entire area—"

"I knowthat we never found a body." She spits out these words, thin and angry, from the back of her throat, but Lincoln doesn't take offense. He only steps closer, wraps his arm around her and tugs her close so that shecan lean against his chest.

"I haven't given up hope either," he says.

Which is something. Because most people have.

"I know," she murmurs. "I know."

She tilts her head back again, looking up at the top of Lincoln's sculpture, the thin metal discs against the cloudless blue summer sky. It’s almost funny, she thinks, how she can so easily imagine them zipping and flying through the trees, even though they're perfectly still. They seem imbued with vibrant life, barely restrained, as if the inherent, manic energy of them has been harnessed, captured, and painstakingly frozen in time.

*

This image—the dark, dull metal of the discs, set against the untainted blue of the sky—stays with Clarke all afternoon, even after she sets out for the river, in the hope that some time alone will keep her from vibrating out of her skin. The river is close enough to the village that she can walk there easily, far enough away that, as a child, she was not allowed to wander out to its banks by herself. Her favorite spot is right next to the waterfall, where the steady tumbling of the water, first down over the rocks, and then over and around the wide stones of the riverbed, is comforting and hypnotic, a gentle reminder of eternity. 

She will sit along the bank with her bare feet in the water, her head tilted back, feeling the sun against her face, letting her eyes close in the summer heat.

When the forest becomes rockier, the trees hardier but spindlier, the incline beneath her feet sharper and the moss thick and lush, she knows that she is almost there. The sound of the waterfall itself comes to her first. Then the rush of the current, louder and louder. Then, abruptly, she is at the river's edge. She pauses a moment to wipe the back of her wrist across her forehead, to catch her breath. The hike took more out of her than she'd thought, and she wishes for a breeze, though the air has been motionless now for days. If it gets any hotter, the season will become stifling. She closes her eyes and inhales deeply, feeling how the air is different here than in the village, how it is headier, earthier, more intense.

Then, into the nature-quiet, out of the soundscape that is the waterfall and the river and the distant chirping of birds, she hears it. An unnatural sound. A rustling. 

Something big in the trees, on the opposite bank.

She forces herself completely still, even her lungs. Every bit of her frozen. Every bit except her heart, the hard beat of which now seems to thunder against her ears. An animal, probably, she thinks, her eyes still closed. Living in the woods means living with the threat of them, but at the village they have their procedures, the lessons drilled into them since they were small, and those lessons still have meaning out here by herself but: what will she have to do? Climb up into the branches of a tree? Wait out the day there, the night? Low waves of disbelief, edging on panic, threaten to overtake calm, cool logic. She's never encountered anything menacing by the river before. Was that just nineteen long years of luck? And if so, good luck or bad?

The sound again, and her hands threaten to tremble. This time, it is not simply a shifting against the ground but something else, something low, bitten back and swallowed down: an involuntary, pained sound. Like a groan. 

A human sound.

She opens her eyes again and scans the opposite bank. On the other side of the river, the ground falls away much more steeply than on the village side, sloping so abruptly that the incline appears almost as a cliff’s edge, a protective wall that, joining with the series of rock peaks that form the waterfall, creates a cozy, peaceful little corner of the forest. Anyone approaching from that side would need to step carefully and stay precisely balanced to keep from tumbling all the way down to the river.

Someone, she sees now, did not step carefully.

He sees her, too. He saw her first, and that is why he is trying not to be seen, trying to be utterly still, wary like an animal attempting to hide itself among the grass and the dirt. He's clutching his ankle, and even from this distance, she can see waves of pain washing over his face. He must have injured his leg when he tumbled down the embankment to the river's edge. Anyone else from the village, Clarke thinks, would immediately cross the river to help him: she pictures Wells dashing across the rocks that peek out through the swirls and eddies of the current, unthinking in his haste, animated by instinctive trust. But Clarke takes a long moment, staring at him with her own breath held, her own heart only slowly returning to its normal beat. Not frozen, but only trying to understand what she is seeing.

The stranger is about her age, and dressed in clothes much too dark and heavy for the season. She glances over his jacket, his boots; she's never seen anything like them in the village, nor in any of the other nearby settlements. And no one who knows her people would ever stare at her with such uncertainty, with such antagonism barely contained, not just as if she were an unknown person but as if she were unknowable, barely to believed, a ghost or apparition or alien.

Maybe Lincoln is right, she thinks, the idea so distant it seems to come from someone else's mind. A tiny thought, whispered low in the curl of her ear. He is the real human, come up from the ruins, and she is an alien. 

Ridiculous, outrageous notion.

But if she trusts herself to be of the Earth, then who is he? Where has he come from? How is that she has never seen anyone like him before?

No evidence at all links him to the ruins, except that, like that strange and broken city, he has appeared without warning, and cannot be explained. The thick soles of his boots and the unnecessary weight of his jacket, the deep colors of his clothes, seem to be made of the same stuff as those rotted buildings, crumbling down from defeated, sunken rooftops, warped with mold, crawling with vines and weeds and unusual plants that seek out the sun through shattered windowpanes. She cannot shake the image of him stepping out from one of those doorways, picking his way carefully over the rubble, down the cracked gray material of those foreign streets. Setting out on a journey of unknown purpose, in the direction of the woods. 

Before, the ruins seemed an ancient mystery, their story inscrutable but long complete, and the only urgency about them was their depth and breadth, how they have swallowed up Wells and left nothing behind, not a single clue, but now—

Clarke watches the stranger, and he stares right back at her. She reads defiance in the set of his brow. Without meaning to, she has curled her hands into her fists.

Could he know where Wells—

The stranger tries to shift backwards, farther away from her, but the movement is useless and only makes him wince. He grabs at his ankle again, and she guesses from the set of his shoulders that he is holding back a loud groan of pain. And a wave of sympathy crests over her. Whatever had caused her to feel distant and faint breaks apart, and she finds herself waving her arm in a wide arc and calling to him: "Hey! Hey, are you okay?"

He doesn't answer. The thought occurs: does he even speak her language? Or can he not hear her over the sound of the waterfall?

She takes a deep breath, a cool determination settling over her. She will, of course, have to cross the river to talk to him, to help him; he can hardly come to her. And though a part of her, the part that speaks to Wells even when he is not there, the part that would warn him against rushing too quickly to an angry stranger's side, cautions against unknown dangers, she pushes it down. He can't even stand on his own. If he does prove a threat, she can easily outrun him.

The stranger watches her, still suspicious, as she hops across the rocks. The water splashes and curls around her ankles as she moves nimbly to the opposite bank.

"Hi," she says again, once she's reached him, though the hard expression on his face warns her against approaching any more. She tilts her head. Up close, she can see that he is brutally handsome: his hair, dark and curling at the ends, falls over his forehead, like he hasn't cut it in a few months too long, and his skin is dusted with the slightest hints of freckles. He's broad-shouldered, and his hands, even grabbing at his ankle in that frantic, desperate way, seem strong and skilled.

"I'm Clarke," she adds, when he doesn't immediately reply, and gestures broadly toward herself to help him understand.

"Bellamy," he answers. His voice is deep, as she'd expected, and low, though somewhat strained, as if from exertion or pain. "And don't worry. I understand you just fine."

 _An alien_ , Clarke thinks, who speaks my language. The thought bubbles up without warning, a sick, strange joke. But nothing about his manner implies he'd appreciate the humor, so she swallows down her smile and gestures, instead, toward his foot. "Do you want me to take a look at that?" 

Bellamy doesn't answer right away, and his continued reticence confuses her. What reasonable person, injured and needing help, would reject an offer of aid freely given? Someone, perhaps, who has never learned to trust, as she has, whose instinctive wariness runs wild and unrestrained? 

A hypothesis that opens up more questions than it answers.

"All right," he says, only after a long moment, taking his hands from his ankle and leaning back to give her room. "Thank you," he adds. The pause makes the words seem like an afterthought, but his tone is quiet and sincere. She wonders if she should read a sort of nervousness there, beneath the lingering distrust.

Carefully, Clarke kneels down in the grass next to him and reaches for his ankle. His manner is still so uncertain, coiled and stiff and defensive, that she instinctively treats him as she does her younger patients: taking extra care and moving slowly, trying to soothe him with perfect gentleness. This is for her benefit, too. Focusing on his injury allows her to forget, for a few moments, just how close he is, how real, and how mysterious still. She can hear his rough and shallow breathing. When she glances at his face—looking only, she tells herself, for signs of particular pain or distress—she can see the beads of sweat gathered on his brow, dripping down his nose. 

She hopes that, in time, he will relax and calm to her touch, but he doesn't. He is still tense like a trap set on a sensitive spring.

"Is this okay?" she asks, as she turns his ankle in one direction, then the next. "How about this? Does this hurt?" 

Her own voice soft and soothing, and his, barely more than a restrained grunt: "Yeah. It's fine. S’okay."

It's not okay, but the real pain only comes when she tries moving the ankle gently to the right. Bellamy yelps, and instinctively grabs for her hands. He doesn't quite shove her away, though, only holds his fingers pressed hard into the skin above her knuckles, his own eyes closed, allowing her to look without hesitance at his face. The striking, smooth planes of his face.

His grip relaxes, and his eyelids flutter open. "That," he mutters, "that fucking hurt. Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

Clarke sits up straighter, lets go of his ankle to settle her hands primly in her lap. "I'm a healer," she tells him. "I know exactly what I'm doing. Your ankle isn't broken, so you're lucky. It's just a sprain. You'll have to rest it for a few days: elevate it whenever possible and go easy on the walking."

Bellamy scowls. "Yeah, that's not going to work for me."

"Then you should have been more careful and looked where you were going." 

Her own face feels warm, her own nerves jangling. Who does he think he is, this stranger, an utter unknown, with his foreign clothes and his accent that she cannot place, gripping his ankle like he's trying to tear it from his own body, glaring at her like she's at fault. If she were cruel, she would simply walk away. But she is not cruel, and she cannot leave him, not without knowing what he knows: if he really is from the ruins, if he holds unfathomable secrets in his heart.

"I'll keep that in mind," he mutters.

Clarke takes a deep breath, releases it slowly through her nose. She wills herself to remain patient and calm. "My village isn't far from here," she says. "I can take you there. I’ll wrap up your ankle, and you can stay a few days and rest up, then go on to... wherever it is you're going."

This, clearly, is the last offer he expected to hear. He's staring at her as if she'd suddenly spoken in an alien tongue.

"And in exchange," she adds, "you tell me where you're from."

"Where I'm from." Incredulous, the words dry and humorless as he shakes his head. His gaze falls from her face and he turns to stare, instead, out across the river where it glints in the sun. "Hopefully from the south, or else I'm completely screwed."

Hard to think of a less helpful answer than that.

Clarke opens her mouth, sure only that whatever she’s about to say will be as snarky and useless as his response, then closes it again. "That's south," she answers, clipped, and points behind them in the direction of the embankment. "And that's north." The other side of the river. "And if you'd kept going in that direction, you would have walked right into my village. So how about you give me a real answer, instead of just 'I'm from over there.'"

Bellamy turns to her, an utterly infuriating look on his face, smug and self-satisfied where he should be awkward and abashed. "You'd never believe me, if I told you where I'm really from."

Impossible. He’s impossible. Clarke huffs, and gets abruptly to her feet, her arms crossed, looking down at him. "I've lived in this forest my whole life," she tells him. "And I've never seen anyone who dresses like you or looks like you. You're the mystery here. And you don't know me well enough to say what I would or wouldn't believe."

She expects he'll argue. Maybe remind her that he owes her nothing, that she's scrambling for answers in the dark, that she's not upset or even frustrated with him but with mysteries beyond him, which he will never be able to unravel for her. But he only tilts his head back and stares at her, and the hard furrow between his eyes slowly softens. She wonders if he has solved some intractable problem in his own mind, as if just looking at her has slotted some answer into place.

"You're right," he says. Surprising her yet again. "I'm the stranger here. And believe me, I know I must be... very strange." He shifts slightly, as if about to pull himself to his feet, and she makes an abortive move to help him, before he settles again. "But honestly, I never expected to meet anyone like you, either. We were always taught that no one survived on the ground."

Clarke can feel her own face, now, narrowing into a confused, uncertain expression, an unpleasant tension in her forehead and lips. "No one survived," she echoes, faint. A slight lilt at the end of the phrase makes it sound like a question, though one that she does not truly want to ask. Images of the ruins flash through her mind, there and gone, impossible to grasp, and a cold, icy feeling settles in her gut. And layered on top of everything else, a strong disbelief, deep-rooted in self-protection: what she knows and what she suspects and what she does not want to know, all at war. "No one survived—what?"

Bellamy blinks up at her. "You don't know?"

She sinks to her knees again, hardly conscious of the movement. Shakes her head but doesn't speak.

"The war," Bellamy prompts. "The last war. The world-ending war. My ancestors were up in space, in space stations that were built for long-term scientific missions. There's this legend that they stood on the observation decks and watched the missiles as they launched. That they didn't even know it was coming—they'd already been up there for years. I guess they knew that plenty of countries had nuclear capabilities but they didn't think it would ever really happen. Then they saw it happening. I found this video once—"

He cuts himself off without warning and clears his throat. The sound of the waterfall fills the silence. For a brief moment, then, his hand covers hers: offered but with uncertainty, then quickly pulled away. He feels guilty, perhaps, breaking such tragic news to her. Except that it does not feel tragic, only unfathomable: another people's story, another planet's past.

"There were a dozen stations orbiting Earth," he continues. His voice comes to her faintly, as if from a far distance. "They joined together to form a structure we call the Ark, and it's been up there... it was up there nearly three hundred years. We tried contacting the surface for about seventy, eighty of those years, but never got a response so we just figured..." He shrugs. "No one survived. And—"

"Wait, wait, wait." All of his words have been crowding up in her mind, stacking up on top of each other and filling up every spare bit of space, but if he says another syllable, everything will overflow. She closes her eyes tight, then opens them again. Flings out her arm and grabs his arm as if for balance. "You're trying to tell me that you used to live in space. Like," she gestures up toward the unbroken blue above. "Like in the sky." He doesn't dispute this characterization, though the set of his mouth is uncertain, and Clarke whistles a long, low, breath. She's still holding on to him, still very slightly but very truly dizzy, and she's glad that she sat down when she did. "Wow. Okay, so—you really are an alien."

"I wouldn't say alien," Bellamy corrects, though he sounds more confused than offended. "I'm human. I'm descended from people on Earth."

"Okay, but—space stations?" She can only guess by context what this phrase even means. "That's a creative idea, Bellamy—"

"You make it sound like I'm making this up."

His voice has taken on a gruff tone again, almost defensive, and Clarke lets go of his arm at last to run her hands over her face. "You know, a month ago I might have assumed you were. What you're saying about living in the sky just seems impossible. But what you're saying about Earth. Some sort of weapon—" What had he called it? Something with an n? "Some sort of weapon that could destroy everything, so your ancestors thought no one was left...."

For the first time, the true tragedy of the ruins breaks open in her heart. They seem not an ugly and broken monument, to some dead and forgotten people, not an artist's vision gone sour and old with disuse and neglect, but rather like a scar. There they are, towering up in her mind: the evidence of a talented and industrious society, reaching up toward the sky with their great buildings, like Clarke is reaching for the sky with her own home, destroyed by some force more powerful than anything she's ever known or imagined, some force that seems to be not of nature but of humanity's own evil design.

Is that what hurts the most? That Bellamy speaks as if human thought and human creation caused such horrors? She'd assumed that some cataclysm of the Earth created the ruins, that only nature itself could ever hold such unbridled power.

"Clarke?"

She feels his hand on her hands again. They've fallen into her lap, and tears are pricking at the corners of her eyes. Bellamy's touch is warm and comforting; his large hand fits perfectly on top of hers.

"Clarke, are you all right?"

"Um—yeah." She sniffs, and wipes at her eyes with the back of her wrist. "I'm okay."

About as okay as he was when she examined his ankle, but the lie will have to do.

"I guess it's a lot to take in. You really didn't know about the war?"

She shakes her head, once, a jerky and reluctant movement. "I knew about the ruins," she says. "But somehow, before, they never seemed... entirely real." 

Somewhere above them, and off to the left, a bird has started chirping in one of the trees: a high, bright, trill of sound, a clear and lovely language that reminds her, as she drifts through impossible new understanding, as she acclimates herself to a universe that is so much larger than she could have ever dreamed, that she is at least still on Earth. She is alive and at rest on the stable, ancient soil. Bellamy's hand squeezes her hand, and she wonders if she appears to be drifting. He's staring at her with curiosity and concern.

"The ruins?" he asks, hesitant, like he would rather not know. Like he already knows.

She tries to explain: "They're—We found them—" 

But how can she put them into words, and especially to him? He’s arrived without warning, bringing tales from secret eras, dug up from the Earth's core, pulled down from the stars. Now he should be the one telling her the deep-buried truths of the lost city. She suspects that he knows them, that he’s memorized whole forgotten histories by heart. 

"We're still figuring them out," she says, at last. "We found them three months ago, at the end of winter, and now some people want to explore them, and some want to pretend that they don't exist. They're—hard to explain. I'll have to show you. But from what you've told me, I think... they're what was left behind in the war."

Bellamy's expression softens, and she wonders if he is feeling sorry for her, or for whoever lived on Earth before her, or for himself. Maybe for all of them. They are all human, after all, and this truth is so much more amazing and difficult to accept than any theory about alien life could ever be. He's still holding her hand and she can't help thinking that she has already gotten much too used to his touch.

"You really should come back to the village with me," she continues. Her voice is still gentle, but infused now with purpose. "I can’t do much for your ankle here. And I know a lot of people who would love to meet you, if you’re up for it. Thelonious definitely will."

"Thelonious," Bellamy repeats. "Is he your leader or something?"

"Yeah. He’s our Councilor . But—what about you?" She looks up, then out past his shoulder, as if expecting more oddly-dressed strangers to fall suddenly from the sky or crash down through the trees. "Are you alone? Are there others with you?"

"I'm—" 

Something in his hesitation, and the pained, nearly disgusted look on his face, makes Clarke think he was about to say he was by himself. He stares down at his ankle and won’t meet her gaze.

"I'm not the only survivor. The Ark was never meant to be up in space for as long as it was. We started running out of oxygen, and we had to find some way to get to Earth. So our engineers brought the whole thing down. All twelve stations. They split apart on their way down and the one I was on crashed somewhere south of here. I don't know how many others made it. I think my sister's station might have survived, so I left to look for it." He pauses, takes a deep breath, then takes his hand from hers and pretends to fiddle with the laces of his boot. Then adds, very fast: "Clarke, you should know that I didn't exactly get permission to leave."

He makes this sound like a dark confession, but she doesn't understand why permission would be needed. "Surely your people want to find the other stations too—"

"My people," he cuts in, weary and yet repulsed, spitting the words out like they're bitter, "think the Earth is full of dangers. Dangerous animals, dangerous people. Or at least, the ones in charge want to play up those risks to keep everyone else in line." He shakes his head. "You tell your Thelonious to be careful of them."

"You're starting to scare me a little, Bellamy," she murmurs, tries to play this off as a joke, but his expression is grim.

"Maybe you should be scared. There are some power-hungry people there, stoking the fears of a population that has no idea what to expect from the ground. I don’t mean I’m a threat—I just want to find Octavia and make sure she can have some sort of decent life here. But either way, if I find her or I don't, I'm not going back there. I doubt I'm valuable enough for anyone to go looking for me. But I'm sure someone's noticed I'm gone by now, and I wouldn't be welcomed back."

He's rubbing his ankle now, slightly too hard, that dark tension about him again that she'd felt when she first crossed the river. Now she reads it not as antagonism or threat but as defensiveness and fear. And she feels a sharp flare of defensiveness, too, a strong and fierce need to protect.

"You'll be safe in my village," she promises. "And when we do meet your people, we'll show them that we don't mean any harm, and neither does the Earth. It's not frightening. It's beautiful and worthy of our respect and care." She lets her hand settle on his shoulder, a simple, gentle touch. "I can already tell that you and your people have so much to offer. And you're going to gain so much in return."


	3. Chapter 3

Trying to cross the river with a twisted ankle is a challenge, one that Bellamy assumes, at first, is made all the harder by Clarke's attempts to help. They step carefully from one slippery, half-submerged rock to the next, the current rushing up over their shoes and soaking the bottoms of Bellamy's pantlegs, two contestants in a futile, interminable three-legged race. He considers how much simpler it would be to look after only himself. He could jettison the challenge of playing off Clarke’s balance, be free of the added burden of coordination. But then, leaning heavily on Clarke as he takes a step with his uninjured leg, he truly lets the image settle, and he realizes that, if he were by himself, he’d never have made it past the first rock. The thought is so unexpected that he has to pause, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist, a heavy breath faltering uneasily from his lungs.   


"You okay?" Clarke asks him. Her voice is unexpectedly gentle—the last and only time she spoke, it was to warn him sharply against stepping too close to the edge of the rock, and he'd thought to himself that she would have made a good drill sergeant for the Guard—and her touch just as disarming: how she settles one hand right in the center of his chest, encouraging his balance just so. He nods faintly. She is so close, so steady. The sound of the waterfall just off to their right drowns out their labored breathing, and when he allows himself to close his eyes, he realizes that amid the flurry of Earth smells, he can pick out something sweet and summery and soft that must be the scent of her hair.   


Eventually, they make it to the opposite side of the river, where they pause again to rest. Bellamy's ankle is throbbing, and he lets go of Clarke to lean for a moment against a tree trunk, trying to will the hard beat of pain to subside. When he first fell down the embankment, the initial hard snap of agony was so intense that he briefly thought he would vomit, and then, trapped in a dizziness that bordered on panic, that he would faint. Something of that feeling threatens again, now, but without the same intensity. He blinks his eyes open and sees Clarke staring at him, half-stepped toward him with her weight on her forward foot, like she's considering the pros and cons of offering to let him lean on her. He still cannot entirely believe the expression of pure concern on her face. Still cannot entirely believe the existence of her: a real survivor, or descendant of survivors, an actual Grounder, an ethereal vision of the past made flesh.   


"You're probably hungry," she says, and the contrast of this practical remark with his wafting thoughts—he had been about to question again if she were a hallucination, as he'd thought she must be when he first saw her approaching through the trees—is almost enough to make him laugh.   


"Starving," he answers. "But—I'm pretty much always starving." He doesn't let her ask the question so clearly on her lips, just pushes himself fully upright again and takes a few hobbling steps forward. "How far is your village from here?"   


"Not far," she says, moving closer, letting him wrap an arm around her again. She tucks her own arm securely around his waist. He hears in her voice something of her curiosity, still, tied up with a secure determination, a sense of purpose; she fully intends to question him about the strangeness of life in space, he can tell, but not before she accomplishes a few necessary tasks, like finding him a place to sit and something to eat. He appreciates her priorities.   


They don't talk much on their trip through the woods. Climbing over tree roots, maneuvering around imperfections in the soil, stumbling sometimes down slight downturns in the land, scrambling other times up inclines: the work of movement takes up all of his energy and nearly all of his breath. Clarke, despite her familiarity with the trail, seems barely better off as she attempts to drag his weight along beside her. He does ask her, a few times, if they are close—"Almost," she says, unhelpfully, each time—and, once, "Why are you helping me, anyway?"   


This question stops her up short. Bellamy almost loses his own balance, but saves himself at the last moment with an awkward hop forward on his good leg. Clarke has tilted her head back to look at him, a wide-eyed confusion temporarily dimming the resolute expression on her face.   


"Two reasons, obviously," she says.   


"Not obvious to me. You don't know anything about me. You couldn't tell if I was a threat. Or if I was worth saving."   


Clarke shakes her head, her mouth a thin, defiant line. "You're worth saving. I'm helping you because you need help. It's that simple. And you're hardly a threat with a twisted ankle, anyway."   


She starts walking again, giving Bellamy no choice but to fall into step next to her. Keeping up with her isn’t easy: she's increased her pace slightly, and he wonders if she’s irritated with him.   


"So that's one reason," he says. "What's the other?"   


"You know the other."   


He doesn't. Basic human kindness would have been his best guess, though even that explanation astonishes him, in its own way, in the way that Clarke's kindness is unconditional. She doesn’t know him, yet she asks nothing of him, requires no payment. He ducks beneath a low-hanging, leafy branch, and guesses, "You're enamored of my charm and quick wit?"   


Clarke snorts. "Sure. It just radiates off of you."   


Walking through the woods is nothing like walking through the Ark: the uncertainty of the ground, its little rises and valleys, the unique texture of the dirt, keeps him always guessing, always just a little on edge. And Clarke, too, of the Earth, is unlike anyone he ever met in space, and keeps on edge, and exhilarates him.    


"Then what?"   


"Obvious," Clarke says again. "I want to get to know you. You know the history of the Earth."   


_The history of the Earth_ . He does, he knows it intimately, but still for a moment he's surprised that  she should know this about  him .  T he stories and myths his mother read to him when he was young, that he recited to Octavia in turn. The hours in the Ark library, paging through ancient histories, unfurling timelines in his head, parsing through anecdotes about the inscrutable and distant lives of the Grounders, tracing the rise and fall of whole civilizations that once lived down below.   


Then he glances at her profile and remembers: she's talking about the war. She has somehow lived her whole life on Earth, on the soil of old battlefields, and has never once heard about the last war.   


How this could be possible, he does not himself understand. But he sees that this new knowledge weighs heavily on her.   


They struggle, slowly, through the trees, the still, hot air around them condensing on Bellamy's forehead and nose and on the back of his neck as sweat, and he's just about to ask again if they are really, truly close this time, when he hears a loud shout from off in the distance ahead of them. He stops up short, and this time Clarke is almost pulled off her feet as she tries to step forward, anchored to him by the steady hold of his arm across her back. His shoulders tense and he quickly scans the gaps between the trees.   


A shout. Really a series of shouts, and screams. Then laughter, high mounting giggles, bright as sunbeams, and the determined fast stomp of feet over the dirt. Kids, he sees now, playing tag in the middle of the woods. Kids only a few years younger than Octavia, but allowed to run and yell and jump, allowed to take up space, allowed to take up infinite space.   


He watches them a long moment, a sharp wistful longing in his chest. The kids don't even notice them, too lost in their game, and in a few moments they swerve away and are gone, two of them roaring after the third in a broad circle back the way they came.   


"We should have jumped out at them," Clarke says, and he wonders if her voice is purposefully light, a reaction to the sad, yearning tilt of his body, an attempt to cheer him. "Given them a good scare. A fun scare," she adds, when Bellamy turns back to her. "I know them. If they hadn't swerved back toward the village, I would have warned them not to go too far out."   


"Too far out? Does that mean we still have far to go?" He shifts his weight onto his bad ankle, just for a moment, hops forward and then resettles onto his uninjured leg. The strain is radiating out now, making his entire body ache in unexpected ways. He lets what is still left unsaid in the moment—his melancholy, her uncertainty—simply lie, and Clarke does not try to pick it up again. "Because you've been saying we're 'almost there' for a while."   


"I was trying to be encouraging," she answers, short, bordering on prim, and starts them walking again. "Listen. Hear that?"    


He does. Over his own loud breaths, over the crack of branches beneath his heel, over the distant laughter of the children receding: sounds of conversation, of movement, of work being done. Human sounds, wafting buoyantly out from the trees.   


"That's the village," Clarke says.   


She takes him on a slight leftward path, away from the loudest of the sounds, away from the main trail they've been following, until at long last, they burst out of the dense forest and into a circular clearing. On one side of the space is a large building and on the other, a tall platform, like a stage. Clarke helps him limp toward the stage and then up an excruciating set of three wooden steps, then leaves him sitting, at last, his twisted ankle resting on the second step.    


"There," she says, dusting off her hands as she takes him in. He considers asking her if she's glad to get the burden of him off her back, but in truth he's glad, himself, not to feel his own weight on his feet, glad to rest, and then, too, she looks so radiant, so satisfied and pleased. The late afternoon sun shines unfiltered into the clearing and strikes brilliant highlights in her hair. No one on the Ark is blonde the way Clarke is blonde. This particular hair color was rare enough in space, and tended most often to come in dull shades, dirty or strawberry blondes, hair somewhere in the borderland between dark blonde and light brown. He wonders if the gene that causes the sheer light blonde of Clarke's hair has died out with time among his population, or if the color is a product of the sun itself, of so much time spent beneath the beauty of the sun.   


He's cursed it often enough since he set out from Alpha Station, wandering half-dazed and three-quarters-lost through mile upon mile of forest, past identical trees bordered by identical trees, sweating stains into his shirt. But here in the peaceful quiet of the clearing, he understands for the first time the depth of what he has gained already from the ground. How lovely it must be, it is, to feel the shine of warmth and light on his skin.   


"Bellamy? Are you listening?"   


"Hmm—what?" He snaps back to attention. The full force of Clarke's blue eyes, the withering disbelief of her stare, has settled on him, but he only raises his eyebrows back at her.   


"Yeah, I can tell. What I was saying—" She cuts herself off, a flare of breath through her nose, and then softens: the expression on her face, the touch of her hand to his knee, to keep him focused. "This is the schoolyard, and the main stage. Classes aren't in session at the moment and there aren't any events planned for tonight, so you should be able to sit here undisturbed while I get a bandage for your ankle. I would have taken you to the recovery house but," she hesitates, just a moment, finally takes her hand away. "But my mom will probably be there and she'll ask a lot of questions."   


"I'm expecting a lot of questions," Bellamy answers, tilting the corner of his mouth up, to show her he's not afraid of parental interrogation.   


"I thought I'd spare you the full force of it for now." But she's smiling too, a soft curl of her lips, a softness around her eyes when she looks at him. He half-expects her to say something else, something more, but she only takes a deep breath, sighs, and says, "All right. I'll be right back. You stay here."   


He lifts his arms up, taking in the clearing, the uncertain parameters of her mysterious village. "Where could I possibly go?"   


The joke, though it is not really a joke at its core, seems to reassure her, and she gives him one last wave and a half-smile before she disappears again into the trees. And then he is completely alone, and the full force of this solitude creeps in on him, slowly but steadily, and he has to rub his hands up and down his legs just to wipe the sweat from his palms.   


Somewhere, invisible to him, the occasional noise of it breaking through the near-silence, the gentle birdsong, are people. Clarke's people. Grounders. He wants to trust that he's safe here but such faith seems naive. How can he truly expect a Grounder, coming suddenly upon someone so unexpected and so alien, to treat him with the same kindness and generosity that Clarke has shown? Maybe she's an outlier. Maybe she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because she found him obviously injured, at some distance from her territory, and maybe one of her neighbors, encountering him instead where he so clearly does not belong, would see him as an intruder, and then what would he do? He still has a knife hidden in an extra pocket of his jacket. And he’d like to think he’d hesitate to use it, but he’s not sure that he would.   


To distract himself from these thoughts, which are macabre and grim and, if not beneath him, at least beneath Clarke and the sanctuary she is trying to give him, he takes a proper look around the clearing. The stage he's sitting on is huge, two sets of steps leading up to it from opposite sides, and a tall blue curtain in the back that probably creates some sort of backstage area, perhaps for performances or plays. Beneath him, garlands of flowers, beautifully woven but slightly haphazardly draped, decorate the front of the platform. He's careful not to kick them or accidentally knock them down with his heel.   


Directly across from him is the building Clarke identified as a school: three stories high, each story round and somewhat smaller than the one beneath, so that the structure as a whole resembles, he thinks, a massive wedding cake. Each story is painted a different color: a dark blue on the bottom, then red, and purple on the top. Circular windows have been cut into it at regular intervals, and the front door, also round, has a window at its center, too. Outside the school, a vast and complicated wooden playground rambles in a half-circle around the edge of the clearing, stretching in wild tangents off to Bellamy's left. He traces his eyes across it, up and over the monkey bars, down a slide, over a set of swings, to a bridge, up a tower—dipping down then to a sort of fort built underneath.   


Octavia, he tells himself, though the thought does him no good, would have loved to play here.   


He's trying to guess what sort of make-believe worlds she could have imagined for herself, climbing up to the top of a dome-shaped jungle gym perhaps, to survey her domain, when movement off to his right nearly startles him out of his skin.   


"Just me," Clarke says, and holds up her hands as if in surrender. She’s holding a folded bandage in one, an intricately carved walking stick in the other, and smiling again, this time fond. "How's your ankle feeling?"   


His ankle. He'd almost forgotten, so distant from his own body that he’d hardly felt the dull, hot pain that seems to radiate from the sprain. "Could be worse," he answers, and shrugs.   


"Could be a lot worse," Clarke agrees, as she reaches the stage, setting her supplies down and settling in. She perches on the second step, her expression now serious and focused, reaches for his ankle and then, readjusting her plan, motions for him to twist around a little and set his foot in her lap instead. An odd feeling, his foot in her lap. Her calm and practiced demeanor is soothing, though, as it was beside the river when she first tested his injury with her careful, skilled fingers, and he feels himself relax, a sense of safety creeping over him, even as Clarke takes off his shoe and pulls off his sock and he sees for the first time how grossly swollen his ankle has become.    


"Could definitely be a lot worse," Clarke says again, which he takes as an attempt at reassurance.   


"Sure. It just looks like my foot swallowed an orange."   


Twitch of a smile at that. "It's not broken. At least there's that."   


She takes her time wrapping the bandage around his ankle and foot, applying just the right amount of pressure, asking him every now and again if it feels all right, if it hurts. He shakes his head, intently following the deft movements of her fingers. When she's finished, she puts his sock and shoe back on for him, before he can object, ties the laces loosely, and pats him on the foot to let him know she's done.   


"All right," she says, sliding off the step and to her feet. "That should help with the swelling. The best thing you can do is not overwork it. Let it heal on its own. Use this to help you walk." She picks up the walking stick and offers it to him. Seeing it up close, he's almost afraid to touch it: the shine of the wood, the beautiful designs along the handle, seem not worthy of his rough, calloused hand. But Clarke only offers it again, expectant, slightly impatient, and all he can do is accept the unwarranted gift. He leans on the walking stick heavily as he stands and settles his weight once more on his feet. The pressure makes him wince, but it's just as much the fatigue in the soles of his feet, the uncomfortable swelling of them in his boots, as the pain in his ankle that irritates him. He's probably walked farther than the whole length of the Ark, and then some, in the last two interminable days.   


When he looks up, he catches Clarke watching him, and as their eyes meet, she covers the concern in her expression with a quirk of her brow. "So? How it's feel? Can you walk?"   


Her question reminds him that he hasn't actually tried moving yet. Should be interesting. He takes a deep breath, then attempts a few steps, planting the walking stick deeply into the dirt and keeping as much weight off his injured foot as he can. Clarke watches him carefully. He's mostly staring down at the ground, but he can feel her steady gaze on him.   


"I don't think I'm ready to climb any mountains," he declares, at last, "but I'll live."   


"That's my diagnosis as well," Clarke agrees. "Projected chances of survival following sprained ankle: one-hundred percent." She starts to reach for his arm, then stops, recognizing belatedly that the stick she'd given him is doing the job her own body did during their treacherous walk through the woods. She has to pretend that she'd meant all along only to fidget with her hands, rub them briefly against her legs, settle them at her hips. "We have a bit of time before dinner. You can rest at my house until then... except it's at the other end of the village from here. Kind of a walk. Do you think you can handle it? We can grab some food along the way, stop and rest if you need to—"   


"Clarke." He takes another couple of steps, showing her his smooth mastery of his walking stick, his bandaged foot. "I can handle it."   


A part of him—the sore, tired soles of his feet, in concert with his empty stomach specifically—would love to rest, right where he is. But his determination is stronger, his sense of pride more insistent, and he can hardly pretend that he isn't intensely curious about this village of hers. The small bit of it he's seen is unlike any image he'd ever found of Earth settlements in the Ark library files. The colorful schoolhouse, the main stage that he might expect to sit in a village square, stuck instead in a clearing, apart from the rest—and where is the rest? Where is it hidden? Where are all the people, whose distant movements he can still hear through the trees?   


His confidence must be convincing enough, because Clarke relents. "Just tell me if you need a break," she says, as she starts to lead him across the clearing.    


They head out behind the schoolhouse and then on to a well-trampled dirt path wending its way through the trees. Bellamy follows a half-step behind her, sometimes watching the path, sometimes the sheen of pure yellow light through the translucent green of the leaves, sometimes the casual and practiced way that Clarke walks upon the earth, the swing of her hands at her sides, the stride of her legs, the angle of her neck—how she does not need to look where she is going, how she is so clearly at home.   


Soon after they leave the first clearing, the path drops them into a second, which Bellamy assumes at first is another outpost, another stop on their way to the real village, whatever that might be. This one is larger and clearly residential: houses ringed around houses, all wooden but of various sizes and shapes, some narrow and tall, others squat and short, some painted bright colors and others unpainted, one with a giant mural on three of its four sides. Most of the houses, he notices, have artwork on or near them: statues in their front yards, tall easels propped up against the outside walls, work tables with half-finished metalwork or woodwork projects out back, elaborate and well-tended gardens flourishing along the sides. Taking in all of the detail of this one neighborhood alone might be the work of a whole day, or a week, but Clarke leads him straight through the center of it, and on to the other side. To the path again, and another clearing beyond.    


Bellamy expects each break in the trees to signal the end of the forest, and their arrival at the main settlement at last. But this revelation never occurs. A different epiphany rises in its stead, slow-dawning and subtle. The clearings are not outposts. He is already in the village. He has been in the village for some time. Here it is, woven in among the trees.   


He tries to picture the settlement as it might appear from above, seen in its totality, and finds himself imagining the path as a narrow string, and each of the clearings as beads set in along that string: a village in the shape of a necklace, a series of jewels embedded in the green. Hidden, glinting occasionally, unexpectedly, in the sun. If he had found it on its own, crashed in upon it in a stumbling, sudden way, what might he have made of it? Would he have believed his own eyes? How could he have predicted he would find such creativity, such vibrant life, in the middle of this endless wilderness?   


Each clearing through which they pass is unique, the function of one unpredictable and apparently unconnected to the last. If there is a pattern to the arrangement of the village, it is beyond Bellamy's ability to understand. Despite his fatigue, he is almost grateful for his injury; it forces them to slow down, which allows him to take in at least a handful of details from each neighborhood they pass. Clarke provides commentary sometimes, but not always, perhaps only when she thinks a bit of explanation is necessary. Bellamy is often left to interpret for himself the strange clusters of buildings, and more often than not, he does not even try, only allows the details to wash over him, to crash over him, to leave behind impressions impossible to pin down with words.   


Here they are in a clearing that reminds Bellamy of the Marketplace on the Ark, but more open, with people freely trading and selling clothes, books, notebooks, art supplies, artwork, and other goods. And here, a space clearly intended for the preparation and organization of food: large storage buildings, and various tables of vegetables, fruits, meats, mushrooms, breads, and cheeses. Clarke picks them up some bread and cheese and berries, which Bellamy eats as they walk, ravenously, nearly unable to appreciate the intensity of the flavors as they fill his mouth. The next clearing includes the recovery house that Clarke had mentioned, along with a building that Bellamy guesses is a gym, based on the equipment he sees outside, or perhaps a rehab facility. Another clearing, one of the biggest, seems to be primarily a social space, with several gardens and a playground and a large fire pit, now cold. The only building, Clarke tells him, houses their Council chambers. Past that, another school, this one long and low, curling around the clearing in a semi-circle like a snake, and featuring massive windows on each side, which Clarke tells him is for the education of older students. Tall, square buildings that look perhaps like dorms dominate the rest of the space.   


Some of the clearings seem devoted entirely to the creation or display of artwork, and it is in these that Bellamy most wishes they could linger. But his ankle is starting to throb again, as badly as before, and the more rational part of him hopes that they are almost to Clarke's house, that he will not have to break down and ask if they can rest.   


Finally, as they pass out of another residential neighborhood and step onto the path again, Clarke says, "The next one is where I live. Don't worry—" she reaches out and grabs his arm, briefly, gives it a squeeze—"we're almost there. Really this time."   


"I'll believe it when I see it," he answers, pretending that the smile at the corner of his mouth is rueful, instead of warm.   


Nothing that Bellamy has seen so far—the tall houses and the squat houses, the round buildings, the narrow ones, the brightly colored homes next to the simple, geometrical structures—has prepared him to give even an educated guess as to what Clarke's home might look like. It could be anything. He tries to will himself to walk faster, despite the protests in his feet and legs, then almost bumps right into Clarke herself when she stops abruptly on the trail ahead of him.   


Bellamy thinks he can see something, the hint of another wooden building, through the trees ahead of them.   


He thinks he can see something else, too, something gray and looming, off another trail to their left.   


"Something wrong?" he asks.   


"What? Oh—no." Clarke shrugs, but her voice sounds distant, faint. She half-turns on her heel and looks up at him. "I know you need to rest," she says, slowly. "But—there's something I want you to see. If you're up for it."   


"Something else?" he asks, tries to joke, but the hesitation in her manner makes the attempt fall flat. She's too serious, and a slight uncertainty, a low nervousness, mixes in with his curiosity, dulling the bright euphoria of it, making the full weight of his exhaustion assert itself with greater strength.   


"Yeah. And—a couple people I want you to meet."   


Bellamy shifts his weight fully onto his uninjured foot, pretending he's thinking, when really he is only gathering up courage. On their walk through the village, they passed by plenty of villagers, vibrant people in simple, clean-cut clothes, who waved to them sometimes as they passed, or called hello to Clarke, but who never seemed particularly bothered or threatened by the strange appearance of Bellamy by her side. But not once did Clarke pause long enough to introduce him to anyone. He'd assumed she was too single-minded, too intent on getting him to a spot where he could rest, perhaps even worried about overwhelming him too much, and in a way he'd been grateful. Eventually, he knew, he'd have to explain himself. He'd have to answer questions, not just about his presence, but about Alpha Station, about the other missing stations, even, and most awkwardly, about the community of criminals he was searching for in the woods. And he'd wanted to put off that moment just a little longer. He'd wanted to pretend he could be just a face in the crowd, hidden and unobtrusive, even though he'd never felt so out of place in his life.   


And now Clarke wanted him to meet someone. Or someones. The mysterious Thelonious, perhaps?   


He glances over her shoulder again, catching a glint of unnatural brightness through the trees, like sunlight hitting metal, the sense of something lurking off an ill-trodden path.   


"Okay," he says at last. "Where are we going?"   


Clarke lets out a deep breath, long held, smiles and loops her arm through his. "To my friends' house," she answers, as they turn onto the trail leading left. "They... they're a little eccentric. Even by village standards. We always try to encourage everyone to follow their own creative path, but... I guess you'll understand when you see it."   


"See what?"   


"Their house. And," she pauses. He gets the impression she is rolling different words around on her tongue. "And what's inside their house."   


_Sounds ominous enough_ , Bellamy thinks, but decides not to ask any more questions. He can already see some of the building, appearing in bits and pieces through the gaps in the trees, subtle hints of it visible as he and Clarke approach along the path. Part of the roof, a hint of window, a bit of wall bright in the sun, a corner dull in the shadow. He imagines that he’s getting an idea of it, that he understands what he is about to see before he sees it.   


But when they break out of the trees and stand at last at the end of the trail, he stops up short, surprised despite himself, and tilts his head back to take it all in.   


The house is unlike any of the others in the village, in material and construction both. It's made of metal, bits of scrap metal specifically, welded together in a three-story tall, slightly tilted, rather ungainly way, with a little peaked bit at the top, like a lopsided hat. A set of stairs attached along the left side leads all the way up to the third floor, allowing access to a balcony that runs around the front and side of the house. The whole structure appears anchored to the earth by no more than a long front porch: a steady, simple platform only a single step up from the ground.    


A large No Trespassing sign is affixed to the front of the house, between the door and the window, but the slight off-tilt of the red letters makes Bellamy think not so much of truly forbidden spaces as of forts, made by children, warning with futility against the invasion of adults. The whole place strikes him as somewhere between an eccentric genius's mansion and an overgrown, monstrous clubhouse. It sits at the far end of a tiny clearing, much smaller than any other clearing in the village, at least as far as Bellamy has seen, barely more than an accidental patch of dirt, encroached on all sides by the questing branches of the trees.    


The space in front of the house is carpeted by a lush, wild garden. At first, he's not sure how they're supposed to cross this barely restrained, human-created wilderness, until Clarke starts walking toward it, and he notices, barely visible, a gray stone walkway down the center, leading up to the front door.   


"Who did you say lived here, again?" Bellamy asks, as he shakes off a mysterious green tendril, which catches on his pocket as he passes by.   


"My friends," Clarke answers, unhelpfully, shooting him a smile over her shoulder. She's at to the door by now, picking up a knocker in the shape of a lion's head that is incongruously affixed to its center, so Bellamy figures he'll know soon enough.   


Clarke knocks twice, then waits, and after a moment, Bellamy hears the thud of footsteps from inside. The door opens—and he realizes he was expecting someone white-haired and ancient and wearing thick, round, homemade lenses to peer out at them from the other side. Not a tall, skinny kid with a pair of goggles perched on top of his head.   


But that's who they've found.   


"Clarke!" the kid says, and wraps his arms around her in a brief hug. Bellamy hangs back at the edge of the porch, unsure if he's been noticed.   


"Hey, Jasper," Clarke answers, her voice warm, then pulls back and steps to the side, gestures back toward Bellamy and adds, "I want you to meet someone. This is Bellamy."   


No question he’s been noticed now.   


Jasper does not immediately answer, only narrows his eyes in a curious, suspicious way, which makes Bellamy feel like he imagines a specimen beneath a microscope must feel. Unsure what to do, he straightens up a bit, raises one hand, and tries, "Hi."   


Jasper's head tilts to the side. "Are you... from the mountains?" he asks.   


Bellamy shakes his head, but before he can explain, Clarke cuts in: "Not even close. He's—"   


Jasper snaps his fingers, flicks his tongue out briefly to lick his lips and says, "Got it. He's from the ruins." He sounds, not surprised or frightened, but deeply satisfied, like he's solved a long-standing puzzle, like he’s been expecting someone from that abandoned city to show up for a while now and here, at last, he is.    


“Wrong again,” Bellamy answers. And then, because he can think of no other way to explain, he says simply, "I'm from space."    


The words, now that he hears them in his own voice, sound anti-climactic, and so utterly unbelievable they border on the idiotic.   


Jasper seems like he might think so, too. He stares at Bellamy for a long moment, unblinking, then very slowly leans in toward Clarke and stage-whispers to her, "Has he been smoking something?"   


Clarke rolls her eyes, and loudly whispers back, "No. Have you?" Then, dropping the tone, crossing her arms tight against her chest: "He's serious. And I believe him. It's not any weirder than half the rumors and theories that have been spreading around the village recently. Not any weirder than your... little experiment."   


"I wouldn't call it little," Jasper answers, but the retort sounds more rote than impassioned; he points his finger at Clarke but never takes his attention off Bellamy. The expression on his face is not only curious or interested, but intense, laser-focused. Bellamy feels as if he's being carefully but quickly scanned, analyzed, and pulled apart, as if whatever wheels keep this strange kid's thoughts turning are spinning on overdrive now, trying to figure him out.   


"So this isn't a joke?" Jasper asks, after a long moment during which Bellamy feels no bigger than a bug beneath a magnifying glass, hoping not to fry in the sun. "You're really from space?"   


"Yes. I mean—" Uncertainty pricking up the back of his neck, wary that he knows where this is going. "I used to live there. I've lived in a space station my whole life."   


He was hoping the term space station might act as a clue, but Jasper either doesn't pick up on it or doesn’t understand what it means. He takes a step closer, but only one. Bellamy's sure he'd like to approach a little closer, but doesn't yet dare.    


"Your whole life?"   


Bellamy shrugs. "All twenty-three years. Not counting the last couple of weeks." On a hunch, he leans forward himself, part mirror, part imitation, part parody, and asks, low, "How long have you lived on Earth?"   


A successful tactic. Jasper grins, finally assured they speak the same language, and straightens up again, out of Bellamy's space. "Seventeen years," he answers. "Zero years in space. If you're from up there," he points toward the sky, gaze still steady on Bellamy's face, "then how did you end up down here? Are there more of you? Is this the vanguard of a large-scale alien invasion, because we've been theorizing—"   


"I'm not an alien."   


Already his voice has the exhausted edge of someone who's had to answer the same silly question too many times. And Jasper's only the second Grounder he's spoken to.   


Jasper raises one eyebrow. "You're not an alien." He sounds, perhaps, a little disappointed. But also, and mainly, confused.   


"He's human," Clarke interrupts. "Like us. He's descended from Earth people, too, his ancestors just...took a detour into space."   


"I'm not sure how that's possible—"   


"He'll explain. But he's hurt his ankle and he really should be keeping it elevated. Can we come in?"   


Jasper glances down, following Bellamy's walking stick all the way down to his bandaged foot, then shoots him an apologetic glance. "Oh, yeah. Of course.” He steps aside, ushering them in. “Sorry I got a bit distracted. Not every day we get space men at the door."   


Bellamy figures space man is a step up from alien, a bit more accurate at least, but he still has to bite back a sigh as he limps his way over the threshold after Clarke.   


The inside of the house turns Bellamy's expectations sideways yet again. He'd been picturing something cramped and dark, reminiscent of the narrow halls and heavily brocaded parlors described in old Earth novels, but what he walks into instead is a wide and open space, awash in sunlight from the tall windows set into each wall. The overall aspect is more industrial than Industrial Revolution, from the shine on the metal surfaces to the sets of long, cluttered tables in the center of the room. More clutter, more boundless stuff, is stacked against the walls and in the corners and on some of the chairs, stuff that Bellamy would like to call junk but that he supposes must be something more like treasure to the occupants of the house. He understands right away that the bits of furniture, the broken dishes, the dirty flowerpots, the shards of glass, and even the rocks and samples of dirt must come from the ruins. That they are artifacts of a forgotten age. That they are the remnants of the pre-war time, and in this sense utterly fascinating to him too, a sort of revelation in themselves.    


Some of these archeological finds are scattered haphazardly on any spare surface, while others, perhaps the oldest souvenirs, have been carefully arranged on a shelving unit that spans most of the back wall.   


In the center of the room, he finds evidence of a different, more specific, sort of discovery, yet another surprise from a settlement that he thought he was finally beginning to understand. So far, he has seen no tablets, no computers, no radios, no sign at all that the Grounders have electricity in their village, and yet here, arrayed across the largest table, is an expansive collection of tech. Most of it is broken down into component parts so small that Bellamy has no idea what he's looking at, or if he’s looking at anything specific at all, but he thinks he recognizes, perhaps, a small, portable radio among the detritus, cracked open and spilling its guts out across the table top.   


Hunched over the table and poking at the radio is a boy about Jasper's age, who does not look up at the sound of their footsteps entering the room.   


Jasper approaches quietly, carefully from behind him, trying to keep himself unobtrusive and unseen, and Bellamy holds his breath, waiting for the scare he’s sure is coming. But instead, Jasper slips into the chair next to the other boy, and gently lays a hand on his shoulder.   


The boy startles anyway, despite Jasper’s efforts.    


“What the hell was that?” he asks, a strain of panic in his voice.   


“Just me,” Jasper answers, palms out as if in surrender. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. But I thought you’d like to know—” He turns and glances over his shoulder, and the other boy’s gaze follows his, alighting at last on Clarke and Bellamy on the other side of the room. “We have a visitor from another world among us.”   


“I’m not really—” Bellamy starts, already inhaling a great and long-suffering sigh, but Jasper cuts him off.   


“Right, he’s not really. But he is from space. Really.”   


The other boy looks at Jasper, eyes narrowed, then at Bellamy, then to Clarke and back to Jasper again. He raises his eyebrows. Jasper tilts his head slightly, his eyes wide and round. An entire conversation seems to pass between them in a few soundless gestures, and Bellamy wonders if, somehow, they truly are communicating telepathically. Some strange after-effect of the radiation, perhaps. Before he can give much thought to the possibility, the other boy leans to the side, far enough to catch Bellamy's eye over Jasper's shoulder, and says, "I'm Monty."   


"Bellamy," he answers.   


Monty is so intense, his regard even more disturbingly focused than Jasper's, and his mind obviously operating at a speed at least as fast, that Bellamy cannot help a certain sense of relief when he nods and turns away. Whatever this Grounder might think of him, at least he seems not to judge him as a threat.   


Clarke spares him the trouble of having to explain himself again, providing Monty a summary of Bellamy's origins, in words this time, as she collects additional chairs and sets them around the work table. One is for Bellamy, one for his ankle, and one presumably for herself, though she doesn't use it. She circles around the table instead, settling herself behind Monty with one hand on the back of his chair, close enough to peer over his shoulder at his work. "I brought him here," she's saying, "because I thought he might have some insight into your project. I mean," she adds, glancing over to catch Bellamy's eye, "if your ancestors somehow figured out how to live in space, they must have built some pretty complex machines. You must have some idea what all this is."   


"We know what it is," Monty says, before Bellamy can even open his mouth. "It's a communication device."   


"Allegedly," Jasper adds, and Monty shoots him a glare.    


"It is." He's holding a small bit of metal, perhaps a needle or a pin, in one hand, and he doesn't let it go even as he gestures, palms out, at the dismantled radio in front of him: a frustrated, futile motion. "It's just not working. That's the problem."   


Jasper twists his chair around, sitting in it backward with his arms crossed on the top rung. "We've been scavenging parts from the ruins for months now,” he tells Bellamy, “ever since Wells first discovered them. Not just parts, all sorts of things. We have this whole theory on... well, not who they were, but what they might have made. All these amazing machines. Totally outrageous shit, observation devices, communication—looks like a lot of it is powered by the sun…"   


"We didn't imagine they had the capacity for flight, though," Monty adds, sounding a bit disappointed at this failure of their imagination. "Especially not space flight."   


"Or space living."   


"But we've only been reconstructing for about three months. It's a massive job, and no one else is interested like we are. Other than Wells."   


"And Clarke," Jasper says, belatedly, looking back at her, but Clarke only shrugs and refuses to meet his gaze. She has, Bellamy realized, retreated in upon herself, her arms wrapped around her torso, her shoulders rounded. He tries to catch her eye, but she won't let him.   


The elephant in the room is obvious enough, but Bellamy still hesitates to ask. “Who’s Wells?”   


Clarke inhales sharply, as if the name said in Bellamy’s voice physically pains her, but doesn’t answer, and Jasper and Monty only exchange another meaningful, inscrutable glance. All of which makes Bellamy feel like an idiot. Obviously, he’s missing something, something it would be awkward for them to explain. He tries again to read Clarke’s face or at least catch her eye, but she won’t let him.    


_This Wells must be her boyfriend,_ he thinks —or her ex, but she’s not over him . This would explain the guilty look on Jasper’s face, as well as why Clarke seems so tightly wound , as if she were about to spontaneously combust . He's hardly surprised that someone like Clarke  is already attached . And if in certain small moments, from a lingering look as she watched him taking in a set of windchimes outside someone’s door, or a splash of stained glass, the way she reached for his hand to pull  him  back toward the path, he thought that perhaps she might feel something of the same low and uncertain but warm and resonant feeling that he—   


“Wells was our friend,” Monty says, abruptly, in a steady tone tinged only slightly by apology. “He was the first to find the ruins, like Jasper said, and then—he became obsessed with them. Even more than we are.”   


“Which is saying something,” Jasper mumbles.   


Bellamy doesn’t take his eyes off Clarke even at this interruption, just keeps watching the flicker of her eyes beneath her closed lids.   


“He was out there all the time,” Monty continues. “Brought back a ton of stuff—even built us this house, from material he found out there. Sometimes he’d disappear for days and not tell anyone. It’s kind of a trek to get to the ruins, so it made sense, but it still really pissed off his dad. They had a big fight about it, Wells threatened to leave the village entirely—”   


“And then he did.” Jasper shrugs, the heavy fall of his shoulders accompanied by a deep sigh. “He went out to the ruins about a month ago—or that’s what we assumed anyway, he didn’t give any warning—and he never came back. There were search parties, but no one found any hint of him.”   


“Everyone assumes he must be dead,” Monty adds. “Except no one found a body either—”   


“Which means he’s not dead.”   


Clarke’s voice, low but strong, defiant, would have startled him if he had not been so attuned to her, watching her and the slow-building anger and hurt passing in shades across her face. The words sound strangled, bitten off between her teeth. “He just doesn’t want to be found.” She hesitates, takes a step closer to the table again, picks up one of the stray wires left sitting there and pretends not to notice the way Monty only barely restrains himself from reaching for her hand, and then adds, bitter and distant, “Not even by me.”   


A short silence follows, and Clarke sets the wire back down, fidgets uselessly with her hands and then shoves them in her pockets, her gaze on the floor.   


“Wells and Clarke were—are—really close,” Jasper murmurs, apologetic, and Clarke tenses as if even this were a blow.   


Bellamy opens his mouth to say something, anything, like that he’s sorry, even though he knows condolences will only make him sound like he isn’t on her side. Which is utterly wrong, because all he knows for certain is that he wants to be on her side. He has some experience, too, in clinging to hope despite the odds, in simply believing, with rigid, stubborn, uncompromising insistence, for no other reason than because to cease believing would destroy him, and anyway, in the end, is either of them so unreasonable? Wells is missing, his body never found. Prison Station is sending out signals. Anything is possible among the strange abundance of the Earth.    


He starts to speak, words he knows won’t capture anything he truly wants to say, but Clarke cuts him off. “We don’t need to talk about this anymore. It’s fine. Just—” she gestures, short, to the scattered mess of tech on the table, fixes a commanding gaze on Monty again. “Tell him about the project.”   


Monty hesitates, still uncertain in the awkward aftermath, but Clarke insists. She pulls her chair closer and sits down at last, expectant and uncompromising. And at last, Monty sighs and says, “Well, I—I guess I thought reconstructing this one would be easier, to start off with, compared to all the other stuff we found. And I still think that’s true. But easier doesn’t mean easy…” He trails off, his gaze flicking across the scattered tech detritus in front of him, a crease worrying between his brows. His mind, Bellamy can tell, is already picking up speed again. Only the slightest sense of social propriety, or perhaps Jasper's hand on his arm, is keeping him from falling right back into his work.   


"So what is it?" Jasper asks, swinging his attention back to Bellamy again. "Are we on the right track? Your people used to live in the ruins. You must know."   


"Our people used to live in the ruins," Bellamy corrects. "All of our ancestors lived on Earth before the war. I just... know more about what it was like."   


Jasper's brow furrows at this mention of the war, and Monty looks down at the tabletop, as if embarrassed. Neither had seemed surprised at the part of Clarke's story that touched on the destruction of Earth, the reason that Bellamy's people stayed for so many generations in the Ark above—perhaps because, having immersed themselves so completely in the remnants of their mystery city, they have already fitted some of the pieces of its history together, or perhaps because the idea of an all-encompassing war seemed at the time more like a story, a tall tale, than a true record of the past.   


Or perhaps it is not the concept of the war, but of the aftermath, the forgetting, that has left even Jasper at a loss for words.   


"It is a radio," Bellamy says, relenting, and reaches out tentatively to pull it toward him. "We have similar ones on the Ark."   


"Radio," Monty echoes, forming each syllable distinctly, so Bellamy understands immediately that the vocabulary is new. Something else fallen through the cracks, left behind.   


"A communication device," he says. "Like you thought. I wish I could tell you exactly how it works or how to fix this one—" He turns it around in his hands, sees that the back is a mess of circuits, as inscrutable to him as if it were a text written in ancient code— "But I'm not a mechanic, or an engineer. I never worked with this kind of stuff."   


Monty considers this a moment, then asks, "So what did you do?"   


What did he do? He mopped floors and picked up trash. He did the kind of work anyone could be trained to do. He did the kind of work that would mark him as expendable, that would make executing him easier, the moment he slipped up.   


From the ground, from this odd metal house in the thick of the woods, in the light and the heat of the sun, not just the Ark but the felled Alpha Station seem eons away, as distant as the ruins Wells discovered and from which Jasper and Monty have been blindly scavenging. He doesn't know how to explain his past to them, what parts of it they would even understand. He considers that perhaps they do not speak the same language after all, that the relief he felt when Clarke addressed him in his own tongue was premature.   


"I was in the Guard for a while," he says. "But that didn't exactly work out."   


This answer seems to satisfy them about as much as it satisfies him, but they don't press. All three, even Clarke, only stare at him, partly puzzled, partly sorry, as if whatever he's tried to explain to them has called up their pity. As if he were the one who does not fully understand.   


“It doesn’t sound like you were passionate about it,” Jasper says, after a long moment, and Bellamy can only laugh, the sound hard edged and mean despite himself.   


“Passionate?” He shakes his head. “No, I don’t think anyone’s passionate about being in the Guard.” Except for sadists, like Byrne. “It’s better—” He leans in, arms crossed on the table in front of him, feeling the truth of the words coalesce as he says them, “It’s better not to be passionate about anything. It’s safer.”   


He takes in their faces, one by one, realizes they have no idea what he’s talking about, but how could they? The village seems to be driven by passion, creativity, fascinations that turn into obsessions, and by intense curiosity, of the sort he has always had to smother in himself. He does not ask himself what he could have been in another life, because this moment cannot take such questions. He cannot, yet.   


Again, Jasper is the first to break the silence. “Space doesn’t seem like it was a lot of fun.”   


Bellamy snorts, leans back in his chair again and tilts his gaze up to the ceiling. “It wasn’t.”   


They want to hear about it anyway, though. Their questions are tentative at first, slight but questing feelers, which twine and grow around each new bit of information they learn. The endless, unfocused interest he feels in the face of their unexpected and beautiful village has now turned back on him, turned up and toward the distant reaches of the stars. His own life sounds nearly impossible to his own ears. Soon he finds that he must begin at the beginning. Soon he finds that he is telling them everything, or nearly everything, leaving out only the most central and most necessary secret, telling them so much and in such detail that, somehow, the afternoon slides entirely away, and evening creeps in upon them at last.   



	4. Chapter 4

Dinner begins an hour before sunset and is held outside. Bellamy thinks he recognizes the clearing from his earlier tour, but already the whole afternoon has become, in his memory, a confusing riot of color and sound and smell, all of the details so jumbled that he's half-sure he will be up late into the night, trying to make sense of the cacophony of them. For now, he thinks only that the large wooden buildings, lined up within the shadow of the trees, seem somewhat familiar. He assumes they must be used for food preparation and storage and perhaps, in the colder months or on rainier days, as a dining space, too. But this day is warm and pleasant in its evening hours, despite the still humid, breathless quality to the air, and a large array of tables has been scattered in the open outdoor space. The tables are of various sizes and shapes, and are covered in multi-colored tablecloths and decorated with bouquets of wildflowers and squat, unlit candles.   


For a moment, pretending that he needs the time to rest his ankle and to catch his breath, Bellamy stares out at the scene and seems to see, superimposed upon it, the dreary grays of the Ark cafeteria, the slumped shoulders of the Factory workers at the metal tables, the anonymous line of stalls along the far wall, where people line up to exchange their credits for trays of food. The cafeteria is rarely quiet, but the noise of it is nothing like the noise of the clearing. Bellamy cannot remember the last time an anonymous buzz of conversation has seemed to take on, to his ears, such a joyous ring. No roof, no walls, no need for windows, hints of muted blue sky above and all around a safe ring of trees, and the air fresh and warm—he took off his jacket halfway down the trail from Jasper and Monty's house, and now Clarke is holding it folded over one arm—and no wonder, he thinks, that the Grounders seem so happy, so simply and broadly at ease.   


Clarke leads the way to a small, circular table at the edge of the clearing, big enough for five or perhaps six people, safely out of the way and almost in the shade. Bellamy follows right behind, trying to make himself unobtrusive and small, despite his foreign clothes and his limp. Now, for the first time, he notices strangers' eyes on him. A few people who seem to whisper to each other as he passes by. Furtive gazes, and lingering ones too, and expressions of confusion and fascination, all giving him a sense of free-floating and ambient danger, an instinctive need for fight or flight pricking up along his spine. Clarke, he notices, does not seem nervous, and if she senses the attention that is now directed upon them, she gives no sign. Jasper and Monty are deep in conversation, unconcerned with anyone beyond themselves (or anything, either, as Jasper bumps into three different chairs and the corner of a table along the way.) But Bellamy is deeply glad to be able to sit down at last, as if by sitting he could camouflage himself. He chooses a spot with his back mostly to the trees, allowing himself the illusion that he can perceive approaching danger on any side, acknowledging only faintly that he believes the truest danger to be coming, not from the inscrutable forest behind him, but from the crowd of unknown and unexpected survivors ahead. He does not distrust them, precisely. At the very least, he trusts Clarke, in an instinctive and complete way that would frighten him, if he were willing to examine it just yet, but the full and multi-faceted reality of them, of Grounders still on Earth, is still only slowly seeping in. They are here. They are real, and there are so many of them. And he is a stranger, an impossible stranger, in their midst.   


Clarke circles around to sit next to him, draping his jacket along the back of his chair along her way, taking that moment to squeeze his shoulders with a strong and encouraging grip. He almost jumps at the contact, then is sorry, berates himself for the few seconds of contact that he did not fully appreciate, in the there-and-gone before Clarke slides into her chair and tries to smile. "You don't need to be so tense," she whispers. "We don't bite. Hard."   


He half-smiles in return, all he can manage, though her voice and her steady presence do feel like an anchor, and he forces his hands to uncurl from half-formed fists.   


"Is this the whole village?" he asks, as he props up his ankle and hangs his walking stick up on the back of his chair. The clearing is large, but crowded; the sheer number of people, and the variety of their dress and the strength of their voices, are all contributing to a slight sense of vertigo that is probably, he thinks, mostly just hunger and fatigue setting in. He'd guess the population of Clarke's community rivals that of the Ark at its height—another way of thinking that her people far outnumber his, now scattered and with so many missing, so many possibly dead.   


Clarke glances around, humming thoughtfully. "Yeah, pretty much. Dinner is a big event for us. It's not mandatory but most people come on most days. A good excuse to, you know, break out of your head, especially if you're really stuck on a project. Or really deep into one."   


"Yeah," he answers, trying to sound like he has any idea what she means. "Right, makes sense."   


Within a few minutes, most of the people have settled into their seats, and the scene in front of him becomes easier to take in, less a flurry of activity and voices, of everyone trying to find their place. The conversation is quieter now and a sense of anticipation settles in. Bellamy scans the clearing, wondering where they are supposed to go now, what they are supposed to do. He sees no large tables of food to choose from, no line queuing up at the entrance to any of the buildings. He's just trying to find a joke about the concept of 'dinner' being different on Earth, when the large double doors of the building to his left fling themselves open, and a group of people stream out, each carrying a large tray.   


Their presence is, at first, startling, then slightly disconcerting, as Bellamy watches them set down a variety of plates at each of the tables. He leans in close to Clarke and whispers, "Do you have servants? Is that who they are?" Even to his own ears, he sounds unduly harsh, accusatory and mean. But of course he should have known: her home seems as carefree and simple as paradise, and paradise must always be built by someone's hands, upon someone else's back—   


"What?" Clarke tilts her head, her eyebrows angling in. A confused and defensive expression sets in upon her face. "No. We all take turns preparing and serving food. I worked in the kitchens two weeks ago." She shifts on her chair, her hands settling uneasily on her lap, her eyes narrowing. "Do you have servants?"   


"No." Then, not breaking her stare, not backing down but unable to explain: "But we all have our jobs, and they're not all treated with respect. Like I told you."   


The hard lines of Clarke's face soften, apologetic, at this reminder, and she reaches out to press her hand against his hand. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"   


"No, I didn't." Didn't mean to accuse you, didn't mean to sound so rude, waiting to find a fatal flaw, waiting for everything to fall apart. Even though a part of him is. He wants to turn his hand over beneath her hand, wants to be holding her hand.   


But the servers have arrived at their table, now, unloading plates of meat and bread and vegetables, baskets of berries, pitchers of water, so much food so suddenly arrayed in front of him that Bellamy falls back against his chair, and almost misses the moment when Clarke pulls away, and the wistful, perhaps sad, expression on her face as she does. He does not have the luxury of trying to explain it, that second like held breath in the way she looks at him. His mouth has started to water and his stomach to grumble and clench tight with pain, reminding him of its emptiness.   


"Go ahead," Clarke insists, elbowing him lightly. "You don't have to wait for anything. Take what you want." She gestures shortly to Jasper and Monty, across from them, who are already loading their plates.   


"Oh—sure, of course," Bellamy mumbles, but still has to take a deep breath to steady himself. His gaze darts across the full inventory of food, a new and unspeakable sort of wealth arrayed in front of him, as if he had discovered a cave of golden coins or a treasure chest of diamonds, like the adventurers in the books he used to read to Octavia when she was small. Just take what he wants. So easy. He scrambles blindly for the utensils next to his empty plate, his mind still teeming with so many thoughts, he can hardly keep them straight.   


One part of him wonders at the origin of the meat now sitting in neat, even slices in front of him, how many animals still exist on Earth and where they might be, if perhaps this is the same creature he used to hear sometimes at night at the Alpha Station camp. Another part takes in the pile of multi-colored vegetables that Clarke is sorting through, and tries to imagine the farmland, vibrant and alive and nothing like the decrepit fields he crashed in, that the village must maintain somewhere beyond the forest. He wonders at the origin of the cheeses and bread, and even of the water. He imagines himself, briefly, hunting and gathering and growing, living off the land like he was always meant to do.   


These thoughts so consume him that he barely has any mind left for eating, a more difficult process than on the Ark because here he must pace himself, must work not to gorge himself and make himself sick. He has nothing at all to contribute to the conversation. He barely even looks up from his plate until, late into the meal, not long after Monty lights the candles on the table to ward off the settling dusk, footsteps approach their table and he hears Clarke greet the new arrival with a bright and falsely accusatory, "Hello. Look who finally showed up."   


Bellamy jerks his head up, stops mid-chew and keeps himself as still as a wild animal in a hunter’s crosshairs. His surprise and embarrassment, at being caught so indiscriminately stuffing his face, transform at once into an instinctive wariness despite himself, even though the new arrival is obviously a friend. He's tall and broad-shouldered, with a sharp, handsome face and a bald head, and he rolls his eyes at Clarke's greeting as pulls up the last chair. "Sorry, sorry, got caught up in a conversation. I'm not really hungry. I've basically been eating lunch for the last three hours with Luna." He leans forward, eyes scanning the picked-over food, reaches for a random berry and, without missing a beat, looks to Bellamy and asks, "Are you the mysterious stranger I've been hearing about all day?"   


Bellamy swallows, hard, and in this pause before he can answer, Clarke cuts in: "This is Bellamy, yes. Bellamy, Lincoln. Lincoln is a good friend of mine, and my neighbor." She lets her hand rest lightly on Bellamy's arm, and adds, "And Bellamy is my new friend."   


They've known each other less than a day. But he's her new friend. Of course. And he is also a fool whose throat turns inexplicably dry at her touch.   


He reaches for his glass of water, nods, and tries, "Nice to meet you. I—take it my story is making the rounds?"   


"You could put it like that," Lincoln answers, smiling, amused and perhaps slightly impressed, as he reaches out to shake Bellamy's hand.   


Bellamy opens his mouth, hoping to find out more about this reputation that precedes him, but the questions die, unasked, on the tip of his tongue. Another figure is approaching their table. And as soon as Bellamy notices him, at first only out of the corner of his eye, he drops Lincoln’s hand and sits up straight: his whole body, his mind, too, set on high alert by some instinct he cannot name. At first, in the growing dark, Bellamy can perceive only the outline of the stranger, and a few details picked out in the flickering candlelight, in the glow from the more severe but distant flames of the torches at the perimeter. He sees that the man is not very tall, yet still imposing, that his clothing is darker than most of the other villagers', that he holds himself with a certain power and confidence, his hands behind his back, and walks with an unhurried step.    


_Thelonious_ , Bellamy thinks. The name floats up into his mind as if from the far depths, an echo of a name . P erhaps a warning. The leader of the village. He’d all but forgotten about him, an omission that now seems dangerously short-sighted and naïve. Who could be more important? What meeting more inevitable  or more crucial ? A sick and nervous feeling seeps through him, a hateful feeling that he cannot stem.   


Pinned by Thelonious's gaze, he is no better than the Cadet who once stood at attention with his fellow new recruits, trying not to wither beneath the Chancellor’s appraising stare, trying not to stand out, trying to look like he belonged. Except that now he cannot even pretend that he belongs. He truly is an alien invader, a trespasser in a world not meant for him. And he is sure that he will be found out in an instant, just as surely as if it were Chancellor Kane approaching him.   


He understands all of this acutely, even though the village leader, revealed now to be a bald, dark-skinned man with a goatee, is looking at him not with the barely withheld scorn of a commanding officer but with a sympathetic, gently appraising expression, a subtle but accepting curiosity around his eyes. At Bellamy's side, Clarke has started to speak, but he hears her tone only, not her words. No nervousness in her. No hesitation and no apology. She's offering introductions, but all Bellamy can do is hold out his hand and manage, the words scratchy but still audible, "It's nice to meet you, Sir."   


"There's no need for such formalities with me, Bellamy," Thelonious answers, as he takes Bellamy's hand. His voice is deep and soothing, enough to make the knots between Bellamy's shoulder blades loosen, at least slightly. "We are always happy to welcome new arrivals to the village. Anyone who needs our help—no matter how far they have traveled to get here. And I understand you have traveled very far indeed."   


"You don't know the half of it," Jasper mumbles. But Thelonious just smiles.    


"I have some idea," he answers, vaguely, gently, as if he were in on the joke. Yet something in his tone sets off a low alarm in Bellamy’s mind. That same instinct that first caused his spine to stiffen at Thelonious’s approach now sounds again, alerting him to a question that cannot yet be answered, but which threatens to tip sideways his understanding of the Grounders and all of their pleasant ignorance of their ancestors’ pain. Because there is something knowing in that smile, those low words. Something like a secret shared in the way his eyes catch Bellamy's, and linger there, something unspoken and unspeakable in the set of his mouth.    


"Bellamy," Thelonious says then, abruptly, into a silence that Bellamy hardly recognized was growing, until it is abruptly cut short. "No need to rush the rest of your dinner but, when you're ready, I'd love to speak to you. I can answer any questions you might have about our community—and perhaps ask some questions of you as well. We'll meet in my office. Clarke can show you the way."   


"That sounds fine, S—thank you. I'll see you soon." The answer, polite but distant, someone else's easy words formed by his mouth. He knows he has no reason to feel nervous, that Clarke would insist he wave away the feeling if she knew, that he must force it down. But still, despite himself, it lingers.   


*   


Thelonious's office is simply furnished, and smaller than Bellamy had thought it would be. A large desk dominates the center of the room, and tall bookshelves, filled with thick, twine-bound notebooks, line the back and left-side walls. To the right, beneath the windows, sits a long table, displaying a variety of hand-carved wooden toys, mostly animals, along with a few imaginary, inscrutable little machines. The machines in particular strike Bellamy as wholly out of place. They make him think of the scrap-metal house in the wood and the scattered tech on Monty's worktable. But he has little opportunity to linger over them.    


Thelonious makes his way immediately to his desk, sets his lantern upon it, and then lights several candles, which illuminate the soft, smooth contours of the table and the desk and the chairs, and lend the room a small and cozy mood. Being invited into Thelonious's office feels nothing like being called to the dark and cramped Council room on the Ark, and yet the room does not have the aura of a home, either. When Thelonious invites him to sit across from him at his desk, he cannot shake a paranoid sense that he is being called to an interrogation.   


To his right, set neatly at the corner of the desk, is a small, crude model of a house, made of a light blonde wood. It sits slightly tilted, but relatively stable, with a little peaked roof and two small, square windows cut into the sides. The light from the lantern flickers and shades along the side of the house, hinting at the dark emptiness beyond the windows, and as Bellamy watches it, wonders vaguely at it, he understands that Thelonious is watching him in turn.   


"I must admit, Bellamy," the smooth, even voice begins, disrupting the silence as simply and unobtrusively as the candle flames disrupt the dark, "before your arrival, I did not believe that anyone still survived in the space stations. I assumed that society must have," he pauses, Bellamy's eyes now snapped to his face—"long withered away." He sighs, and allows the straight set of his shoulders briefly to hollow and bend. He seems older now than he did in the late-dusk light of the outdoors. "I apologize for that. I don't mean to imply that I thought your people were weak. Only that I did not believe that humankind could possibly survive so far away from our home on Earth. It is a miracle that you have found your way back to us."   


Bellamy's hands clench tight around each other in his lap, fingernails digging with harsh purpose into skin. His eyes narrow, and he feels the steady beat of his heart thumping too hard in his chest. Space stations, he thinks. I assumed you must have long withered away.   


"Are you saying you knew?" The question snaps from him, sudden, brutal but only because it must break through his disbelief. "You knew about the Ark?"   


Thelonious does not take offense. His smile is sympathetic, almost indulgent. "Yes. I know something of it, at least. Not the name. But I knew that there were rumors of outposts in the sky, where people might still be living..." He trails off, sounds almost sad as he crosses his arms on his desk and leans forward, his gaze drifting out toward the windows. They reflect only the candlelight, the inside of the room, almost nothing of the black night sky outside. But Bellamy knows he is imagining the stars.   


His own mind is whirring, a fast machine, and he has no patience for wistful, drifting thoughts. "So you know about the war," he says, the words loud and sharp-edged with certainty, no question to them. "You know about the bombs."   


"I know all of it," Thelonious answers. He's still staring at the window, not at Bellamy's face, but he does not appear embarrassed, nor ashamed of the secrets he holds. Perhaps he feels that, between them, here, behind the closed door of his office, truth can be safely shared. Perhaps he feels only relief, that sitting across from a man from space, he has no reason anymore to lie.   


"Everything?"   


"Would you like to quiz me, Bellamy?" Half-smile on his face, as if this were funny, but only faintly so. "I can't promise I have every detail correct. But the broad outlines: I know that humans once numbered in the billions, that we created not just amazing structures and machines and technologies but also grotesque weapons, that we used those weapons to destroy almost everything... That your people had already escaped Earth before this occurred. That my people started from nothing, rebuilt from nothing, grew strong."   


"Forgot."   


Or were forced to forget.   


Thelonious's eyes flick to Bellamy again, and Bellamy sees now that his expression is appraising, sees the quick and certain mind behind the pleasant, soothing facade.    


"Why do you remember," Bellamy asks, "and no one else does?"   


"Because it is a burden to remember," Thelonious answers, "and a kindness to let the rest forget. Over three hundred years have passed, Bellamy. Civilizations rise and fall in timespans like those. Much is forgotten, even in the normal course of time. And the end of the world itself—what event could wipe the slate clean more completely, more decidedly, than that? Why should my people concern themselves with the crimes and the traumas of a civilization that destroyed itself so utterly?"   


"That's easy for you to say. You know. You remember. You get to keep all of this information to yourself, and share only what you want, what you think they should know—" He cuts himself off, wary of the anger in his own voice, wary of the tenuous control he holds over himself, which he already feels slipping. Thelonious seems perfectly at ease, undisturbed by the pitch of Bellamy's words. He does not hold himself like a man accused. Nor does he seem impatient, and Bellamy takes the moment that is offered to try to steady his own thoughts.   


"Did your people know," Thelonious asks, only after a long moment, "about the existence of survivors on Earth?"   


Bellamy shakes his head. "No. We thought everyone had died."   


The spreading fire on the surface, crackling deep red in the dark. An inferno. A hellscape. The grainy video feed, jumping and unsteady. The whole planet ablaze. And somehow from that—new growth, new life—an impossible dream. In some illogical way, he had believed in the resiliency of trees and plants and mountains and rivers, but people, so frail, only flesh like his flesh—he had truly believed that they had all perished, every single one, that no one could have made it through alive.   


Thelonious is staring at him, his head tilted slightly to one side. "Everyone thought that?" he asks.   


"Yes." He answers without thinking, then hesitates. He must, of course, be vouching now for the honor and the honesty of the Chancellor and the Council, a circumstance that is equally funny and grim. He scowls at the dark humor of it. Why does he believe that the Council will lie about everything, will cheat the ration system, will cheat the justice system, will spy and scheme against its own people, but would never hide the evidence of human survivors on Earth?    


Because, he thinks, it would not suit their purpose to lie? And yet wasn’t the strongest propaganda on the Ark that its residents represented the last of humanity in existence? That every law and every punishment and every unfairness was in service of protecting the very last survivors of the race?    


Were Byrne and Kane truly afraid of Diana Sydney's people, or of Thelonious's?   


He can't be sure. Either possibility seems possible: that he has been lied to as Clarke has been lied to, or that in this one instance even the highest-ranking members of the Ark were truly ignorant of the truth. Thelonious is still watching him. He looks down at his hands and shrugs.   


"I don't know," he admits. "But I can tell you that until I met Clarke this afternoon, I truly believed that the last Grounders died three hundred years ago. And if I was lied to, all I can tell you is that I don't think it did me any favors. Just like lying to your people isn't helping them. And I think you know this, or this history would have died long before you. But your people have preserved it for some reason.” He leans closer, over the table, feels the heat of the lantern close and warm next to his arm. The thoughts come to him only as the words do, theories slotting neatly into place. “Have you already passed it on to someone else? Why bother, if all that ancient history is only a burden?”   


Thelonious's eyes are half-closed, his gaze down-turned. Bellamy thinks at first that he must be looking down at the top of his desk, and realizes only after a long moment, the imperfect rhythm of his own breathing too loud in his ears, that Thelonious is staring quietly at the model house. Bellamy exhales slowly, sits back in his chair. The house, he thinks. Simple and ill-formed, slightly tilted. Something a child would make.   


"It is true," Thelonious says, slowly, the first hint of a crack in his voice, "that the intellect rebels at loss, just as the heart does."   


_Wells became obsessed with the ruins... He even built us this house, from material he found out there._   


"And I suppose that is the reason, more than any practical consideration, that a few of us have carefully handed down the stories." He clears his throat, looks up at Bellamy again, his eyes shining in the dim light. "The official reason for preservation is that we do not want to repeat our ancestors' mistakes."   


"Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it?"   


The corner of Thelonious's lip curls up, a small capitulation. "Something like that. But you should understand, Bellamy, this fear, that humanity is inherently doomed to a cycle of innovation and destruction, is also why we do not share these histories widely."   


Bellamy curls his fingers around the ends of his chair arms, bites his lip but still can't stop himself from answering. "Because you don't want the people getting too many dangerous ideas?"   


At this, Thelonious does manage a laugh, dry and hollow. "You sound like my son. What I mean is that values can be, inevitably are, passed down just like skills, just like the past can be, and our values are based in the present, in caring for the Earth and for each other, in preserving peace with our neighbors, in nurturing creativity and creation. There is no room in this value system for dark rumination on what once was. The people who destroyed the Earth—you must understand, Bellamy, I hardly claim them as our ancestors. In a literal sense, yes. But the reason my people survive to this day is because we are descended from those populations too worthless to target for destruction. I would rather disavow those wretched warmongers entirely. Some days," he hesitates, aware he has already said too much, yet unable to stop, drops his voice low and confesses, "Some days I truly wish I did not know of them."   


Bellamy doesn't buy it. He stares, unblinking, silent, hopes his face is unreadable even to Thelonious's steady and discerning gaze. He's thinking about the son, who must have known both who built and who destroyed the ruins, who was so moved by the awe-inspiring evidence of them that he disappeared within them. The son Thelonious may now think is dead, may now blindly hope is still alive.   


"I can't say I relate to that at all," he answers, at last, catches a hint of amusement briefly ghost over Thelonious's face. "Not wanting to know the worst of the past, pretending it's not yours when you know it is. I think you know it's part of human nature to need to connect yourself to something—"   


"Yes, to our families, our communities, our planet."   


"And if you don't have any of that? Look, Thelonious," he leans forward again, the urgency of confession animating him, not letting him stop what he was begun, "I've seen your village, and it is amazing. Your people are lucky to live like this. But I see them painting and drawing and sculpting and making all of these beautiful objects and I think—well aren't they trying to know themselves? Aren't they trying to understand something fundamental about life, about being alive?"   


Thelonious open his mouth as if to answer, but Bellamy keeps talking over him, desperate to find the right words, even for himself.    


"Up on the Ark, none of that exists. You said you couldn't believe it was possible for humans to live in space and I don't think you meant that it wasn't possible for us to breathe or to eat, but that it wasn't possible for...for the human spirit to survive in conditions like that for so long. Right?"   


Here he does pause, a moment long enough for Thelonious to nod, the slightest admission.   


"You're right. Sometimes we go hungry, and our oxygen system is junk, and—and so much else, I can't explain, but some days the worst is that we are so far from home and we know it. I don't have much family. Recently I've been...separated from my last relative. And I've never been able to make friends or...or bond with my community in a way you would understand. And I don’t exactly have any creative outlets. But I had the library and the historical databases and that made me feel... human."    


This word, after so many words, so many more words than he'd had any intention of saying and which make him feel, now, in the aftermath, like he has poured himself out and left himself with nothing, gasping and spent—this word at last dries out and cracks on his tongue, and he feels that even holding on to Thelonious's gaze, now, is an act of will. But he does.    


Despite the steady lantern glow, the shadows of the room seem to press in close. Beyond the windows the night is dark, complete. Bellamy cannot remember the last time he saw the moon.   


"I should thank you, Bellamy," Thelonious says, then, his voice calm and steady once more, so that Bellamy feels like the words are drifting to his ears only across a great chasm, and he wonders if he has been a fool, if he has said too much. "You have given me a great deal to think about. And of course I must, since, as I'm sure you've figured out, this debate is mostly hypothetical by now."   


He's slow to understand what Thelonious means, and when he does, he finds that only a precise strain of exhaustion, not a physical fatigue but an emotional emptiness, a surrender to himself, keeps him from laughing aloud. "You mean because of me," he says. "And my people."   


"And because of the discovery of the ruins. The rumors that have been circulating now for quite some time. Perhaps my people have been naive to assume the past can be so easily buried." His eyebrow twitches briefly up, and Bellamy, recognizing the offer of a joke passed between them, replies with a thin smile.   


_Some of your people_ , he thinks.  Most of them never had a choice about what to remember, what to forget. Because  never knowing is easy, but  forgetting is so difficult. Maybe impossible, to pretend not to know what you know.   


"So," he asks, "what happens now? What are you going to do?"   


"About you?"   


In a different tone, those words might have sounded like a threat. But Bellamy just nods, feeling not even an instinctive fear, only a light sheen of curiosity.   


Thelonious answers, unhelpfully, "I was hoping that you might tell me."   


"Me? You want my advice?"   


"Is that so difficult to believe?"   


It is when no one has ever asked his opinion on anything, ever, in his life. But he's already said more than his share. He only shrugs and waits for Thelonious to go on.   


"Who else could I ask? I need you to tell me how many sky survivors are out there, and what the rest of you are like, what I and my people should expect from your arrival. You are the expert on your own society, aren't you? If you were in my place, now, what would you do?"   


And now, at last, the true purpose of their meeting becomes clear, not a chance for light philosophical discussion, but a strategy session, called by a leader who fears that his grip on his community may be endangered, who fears, perhaps, a more definite and literal danger to come. But Bellamy cannot blame him for his nervousness. He thinks about Alpha Station, only a two days' walk away, a slowly tightening vise of resentment and fear, and of the raw and violent power of Major Byrne and the Guard, and of the treacherous uncertainty of the Chancellor's hold on his authority. He thinks about Prison Station, a bunch of abandoned and forgotten kids left to themselves in a new world, hardly a single Earth Skills' expert's worth of information among them, and his sister there in the mass of them, just trying to survive. He tries to imagine the other stations, perhaps utterly destroyed, perhaps a handful of survivors here and there, or perhaps the sites of whole nascent societies, starting to form far from the control of the Chancellor and the Council and the old Ark Code. And he wonders how he might ever distill all these variables and all of these unknowns into something Thelonious can understand and use, let alone something he could explain to the village, for whom even Bellamy's arrival must be a world-altering discovery.   


At last he settles on: "I'd worry.” He meets Thelonious's eye, keeps his voice steady, doesn't let his words run too fast into each other, because he wants to be believed. "There were twelve stations making up the Ark. All twelve of them crashed down to Earth. I know what happened to Alpha, the one I was on, but I can't tell you if all or some or none of the other eleven even made it down in one piece. The Chancellor of the Ark survived and he's at the Alpha Station camp, a couple of days' walk from here. He's trying to keep control of the population there, but they are... they're afraid. They're afraid, and that should worry you."   


"Surely you've seen enough of the village to know that your people have nothing to fear from us."   


"I have, but they don't even know you exist. They're not scared of Grounders specifically. They’re scared of everything they don't know. Where our other stations are, what animals might be in the woods, what food is safe to eat. And that kind of fear, it can be turned into anything." He forces his hands, grabbing too tightly to the armrests of his chair, to relax and release their grip. His knuckles hurt. His ankle hurts. "But you're the leader of your people," he adds, "so I probably don't need to tell you that."    


Thelonious does not answer, only hums, a low sound into the silence after Bellamy speaks. He does not seem frightened. Rather like he has retreated into himself to strategize and plan. “I do know,” he says. “So—leader to leader—what would you have me do?”   


Bellamy scoffs. The noise sounds obscene in the quiet, but it escapes before he can stop it, and even then seems like the most appropriate response. “Sir—Thelonious—I’m not a leader. I’m—” might as well say it—“I’m a janitor.”   


Thelonious gives no sign that he is embarrassed by his mistake, only allows a slight furrow to crease between his brows. Surprise? Disapproval? Perhaps he doesn’t understand, as Clarke and Monty and Jasper didn’t, why Bellamy would fit himself so neatly into the box of his job, define himself so simply by his use. “I think you’re something more than a janitor, Bellamy,” he says. “But I admit it is unfair, to ask you to solve such a difficult problem, when it really is mine to untangle.”   


Maybe. Still Bellamy cannot help but feel that, if Byrne were to march a small army of Alpha Station Guards into the village, looking for food or weapons or motivated by some imagined slight, that would be just as much his problem as Thelonious’s or Clarke’s—his problem and, more importantly, his fault, as if he were a beacon leading wrath and destruction to their door. He cannot be the harbinger of such devastation. But even if he left tonight, as a part of him knows that he should do, he cannot erase this knowledge from his mind: that Clarke’s village exists, that Alpha Station is all too close, that if the two should meet a peaceful outcome cannot be assured. And because he knows, this potential threat, posed by his own people, has become his problem, too.   


“Thelonious,” he says, and waits for the village leader to look up. “I’ll be honest. I really don’t know the answer. I hope my people will be reasonable. But I can’t make assurances for them. All I can tell you is that you should decide on a plan sooner, rather than later. A story to tell your people. And an idea of what sort of relationship you want with the Ark survivors. Because I doubt I’m the last one you’re going to meet.”   


Thelonious sighs. For the first time, he sounds weary. Bellamy gets the impression that his thoughts are already drifting, approaching somewhere where no one can follow, and he feels like an intruder within a private space. “Thank you, Bellamy,” he answers. “I will keep that advice in mind.”


	5. Chapter 5

Main circle is alight with activity in the evening, especially during the warmer months. People gather around the bonfire, talking, debating, joking, while children play in the light of the torches, waiting for their parents to collect them and bring them to bed. Couples walk hand in hand through the sculpture garden. The sounds of animated voices and of laughter merge with the crackling of the flames, to make even the settling darkness seem alert and alive. 

Clarke sits apart from all of this, by herself on a bench outside the Council Building, Bellamy's jacket folded in her lap. She tries to guess how long he and Thelonious have been talking. A long time? An average time? Can there be such a thing as an average conversation, in such unprecedented circumstances as these? 

Though they have only known each other half a day, already she feels awkward and ill at ease without Bellamy next to her, which is irrational and troubling. She attributes the tension in her stomach to curiosity instead. She does not want to be excluded. She wants to know everything Bellamy is telling Thelonious, wants to know if he is sharing secrets he has not yet shared with her—wants to be the person with whom he shares everything, all secrets, which brings her back to where she started, this feeling of intense yearning that wells up in her at even the thought of his face. 

Her fingers tense around the fabric of his jacket, harder and harder, until they hurt. 

The jacket, at least, is safe to focus on. It is dark and heavy, designed as if out of repurposed materials, old and soft on the inside but stiff on the outside, as if whoever first created it cared deeply about warding off the elements. She thinks of Bellamy sweating as he walked through the forest, burdened by it, yet for some reason loathe to take it off. When she found him by the river, he was carrying nothing with him, not even a container of water, and she remembers his stories of deprivation and rationing on his spaceship, the implication that he had left his camp surreptitiously, quickly, in the middle of the night. Perhaps the jacket is all he has. Perhaps it is his only possession in the world. 

It has an unusual number of pockets, both on the outside and inside. In one, she finds a handful of nuts and berries. She remembers the way he devoured dinner, and wonders how long he has been subsisting on only these. Her breath is little more than a shaky exhale as she returns them to their place. In another pocket, her fingers run across something hard and thin and oddly shaped. She feels along the edge of it carefully, through the fabric of the jacket, unsure where to find the opening of the pocket in which it has been hidden. Not either outside pocket. Not the most obvious inner one. Until—there: an extra hiding place just above the most obvious right-side pocket, tucked almost invisibly into the fabric. She sneaks her fingers in carefully, searching, then wraps them around a bit of warm metal and pulls out the mystery object at last. 

A knife. 

Her first thought is that it looks like something Jasper could have put together, from bits of haphazardly painted scrap from the ruins. The handle is a hunk of twisted metal, splashed with yellow and blue, and attached to a small, sharp blade. Clarke turns it around and around in her hand, considering the beauty of it. Distantly, she wonders if this discovery should frighten her, or worry her, if a stranger with an impossible story, arriving in the village with a weapon hidden on his person, should perhaps inspire in her at least a hint of wary curiosity. But what she feels instead, unfurling subtly, is only a steady and instinctive trust. She could tell herself that Bellamy has given no sign of wanting to harm them, and this is true, but quite beside the point. The trust is not based on logic or evidence but on a feeling, a sense of him, and she runs her fingertip along the handle of the blade and wonders if she will someday beat herself up for being so naive. 

Yet all she can think as she considers the object, the small, slight weapon, the bit of space metal that she is inexplicably holding in the palm of her hand, is that Bellamy's story feels more real now than it did when it was only words. She understands now in a visceral way that when he stole away in the middle of the night, searching for his family and some safe and pleasant place for them to live, he truly had nothing. He had his jacket, and a knife. Not even a bow and arrow to hunt with. No sense of what dangers he might find, little idea of where to go, on a planet as alien to him as space would be to her. And she thinks: _brave, foolish man_. And then, remembering Wells, and her own paralysis, her own helplessness: _brave man_. 

When she hears the door of the Council Building open, she shoves the knife quickly back in its pocket and stands up, turning toward the sound. Bellamy is closing the door behind him, his gaze down at his feet. 

"Bellamy!" she calls, waving her arm to catch his attention, then briefly stooping to pick up the lantern she'd left next to the bench. "Hey—" Running up to him, falling into step next to him. "How did it go?" 

He's limping more heavily now than he did before, and she feels a stab of guilt, wondering if she should have insisted that he rest after dinner instead of wearing himself out even more. Worse, he seems distracted, still barely glancing at her, his fingers wrapped tightly around the top of his cane. And though he's walking straight ahead with unusual purpose, as if needing to put distance between himself and the Council Building, any distance at all, she knows he can't have any idea where he's going. She pulls him up short with a hand on his arm just before he crashes right into a pair of kids, who are running with their own sense of abandon directly across his path. 

"So it _didn't_ go well?" she asks, trying to smile, as Bellamy turns at last and lets his jumpy gaze settle on her. 

"It was—fine," he answers. 

"Fine?" 

A sharp edge of disbelief to her voice, her eyes narrowing. She wants to press him on this, even more when she notices how he is clenching his jaw, the definite tick at his temple. His eyes are flicking fast across her face, like he’s trying to read her. She opens her mouth to ask him again but before she can, he says, quick and urgent, as if afraid any hesitation will kill the words before they form: 

"Have you ever found yourself talking, without wanting to talk? I don’t—I don’t mean like _coerced_. I mean like you try to explain yourself, even a little, and then you find yourself just talking and talking?” 

Clarke relaxes her grip on his arm, then lets her hand fall, tucking the arm holding his jacket in against her chest. "No," she admits. "I'm not sure what you mean." 

He lets out a hard sigh, frustrated, she thinks, not with her but with himself. All that tension still held tightly in his jaw. "Your Councilor," he tries, instead, "he treated me like I was important. Like I had something important to say. Like you do, and your friends do. I've never felt that way before and it—it's harder to keep things close." 

"You mean it's easier to keep secrets when no one's asking you questions." 

His shoulders fall, a certain weary smile curling at the corners of his mouth: a little reluctant, a little guilty, but soft. "Something like that. Now you probably think I have terrible secrets to hide." 

"No.” Her own voice is quiet and serious. “I don't." 

He doesn’t want to be known. He doesn’t feel safe being known, for reasons she doesn’t yet understand, but can maybe guess, and yet she wants to know him so badly, wants to reach up and push away the stray curl falling into his eye and show him that gentleness can be sincere and true. Perhaps he sees something of this in her face, because his half-hearted smile fades, and he stares at her with an expression, not entirely readable, that makes a warm blush rise to her cheeks. 

She wants to be anywhere, literally anywhere, than here in main circle, the object of who even knows how many prying eyes. 

"Clarke—" 

"Bellamy. Look. Do you want to get out of here?" She offers this time a small smile of her own, and gestures back, with the hand holding her lantern, toward the forest behind her. "My house is just over there. It'll be quieter." _More private_ , she means. _Easier to talk—if you do want to talk_. She wonders if he takes the suggestion as implying something more than it does, and if so, if she would correct him, if he might have the right idea after all. 

But he only smiles, too, not fully at ease, but enough to show her he is trying. "Your house?" he asks. "Your mythical house that I've heard so much about? I'm not sure I believe it exists." 

She rolls her eyes. "Funny. Come on." 

She takes a few steps, lets him settle into a slow pace beside her, until they reach the path out of the clearing and back into the forest. A closer, deeper darkness settles in around them, broken only by the steady orange glow of her lantern, held aloft. They walk slowly, so Bellamy can navigate his way over the uneven ground, and Clarke has to open her mouth several times before she decides it is the right moment to say his name. 

"Bellamy?" 

"Yeah?" 

"I want you to know—you don't have to tell me anything. But you can, if you want. You can tell me whatever you want." 

He doesn't answer right away. She can hear him next to her, trying to keep his breathing steady despite the exertion of the walk, and out of the corner of her eye she sees that his head is bent and his gaze fixed resolutely on the trail. 

"Why are you telling me this?" he asks, then. 

It's a stupid question, Clarke thinks, so she huffs out a hard breath through her nose and says, "Because. You made it sound back there like—like no one's ever said that to you before. I wanted you to know, I'm not just curious about space or about your people. I—I think you're important." 

_Really important. Perhaps frighteningly important_. 

Even after dark, the air is still warm, though the humidity of the day has leeched away and a soft clarity has taken its place. She holds the lantern up higher and the light sways and casts erratic rays among the trees. She is too aware of him, walking next to her, close enough to touch and yet not touching. 

"Then can I ask you something?" he says, after a long moment. 

"Yeah." 

"Do you think your people are ready to learn about mine? I mean—really." 

Clarke listens to the far-sounds of main circle behind her, to the even-less-certain noises from other clearings, ahead and around them. They're passing through a quiet residential neighborhood now, almost completely dark, almost completely still. His question is not one she will insult with a quick or rote response, and Bellamy does not hurry her. 

"Yes," she says, at last, stepping back onto the trail again. "I know Thelonious thinks we're not. But too much of the past is finding its way back in. Not just you, I'm not saying you're the past, but the discovery of the ruins, and now your people coming home... It's not a choice of knowing or not knowing," she continues, slowly, settling the thoughts for herself even as she forms the words, a long-held but wafting realization now becoming solid and defined. "Now we either know the truth or we pretend fantasies are the truth, or theories, or even conspiracies. I think he should be more worried about that than he is: what will take the place of truth when we think truth is being withheld." 

Bellamy doesn't reply, and she looks to her left to make sure he is still with her, though she can hear his uneven, limping footsteps thudding, can even imagine she feels the heat of his body, his arm not quite brushing up against hers. Perhaps she hoped she'd catch something of his thoughts in the downturned profile of his face. The light splashes over him, wavers, quivers, and all she can see is that he looks serious, and thoughtful, and distant. 

“I think you’re right to be nervous,” he says. “Trust is hard to regain when it’s lost. But—I understand keeping secrets to protect people who are important to you.” 

“You think that’s what Thelonious has been doing? Keeping secrets?” The implication, that he could have known about the history of the ruins even before their discovery, that even now he holds some secret knowledge close to him, is unsettling enough, but Clarke can hardly focus on it. Bellamy’s words are halting and careful, the surface of an argument he is having with himself, a hidden and subtle confession underneath. 

“Maybe. At least, that’s what it’s going to look like, as more of the past comes out. If it was just the past, I’d say—it’s wrong to hide that. But if I could protect your village from the Ark, so you could stay just as you are—maybe I would.” 

“What do you mean ‘protect us’?” She slows her pace, listening to the way Bellamy’s uneven breaths break up his words. But he seems loathe to break his stride. 

“From anything that could change—” He gestures vaguely, a reluctant sigh as words fail him. “This. You don’t understand how beautiful this world is to me, Clarke. Or how much I wish it was my world.” 

_It could be_ , she thinks. _It could be. You could belong here_. But somehow, she does not trust he would believe her, not yet, not just now when he seems ages and miles away. And anyway, the path is opening up now, the clearing ahead visible. It’s easier just to tell him, “We’re here.” 

She steps to the side and allows him to walk past her, holding her lantern high so that he can see the clearing and she can see his face. A curl of tension tightens in her stomach. More than any other spot in the village, this is her home, and she wants him to like it—wants him to like it, not because she needs his approval but because she wants to share this private little corner of the world with him. She wants him to feel in some way that it is his, too. 

At first, his expression is unreadable. She watches his eyes travel from Wells's house, which is quiet and dark, and has at night an even more melancholy air of abandon than during the day, then all the way to Lincoln's, which stands in sharp contrast on the other side of the clearing: the ground floor lit bright and alive with merry strains of music and voices and laughter. Bellamy seems not to notice her house at all. 

His gaze follows the circuit again, and in the imperfect lantern light, she sees some of his own desperate uncertainty start to unfurl, the rigidity leaving his shoulders, his fingers loosening their grip around the top of his walking stick. "Let me guess," he says, as his eyes alight on the bottom of her rope ladder, and follow it up, and up, and up. He gestures vaguely toward the treetops, the shadow of her little square house, with its square windows, the neat little balcony that Wells insisted on adding, all nestled in safely among the leaves. "That one's yours." 

Clarke smiles. Relief, warm and light, washes over her, and she bites back the urge to twine her arm through his arm. "That one's mine," she echoes. "And," gesturing to the right, "that's Lincoln's, over there. Sorry about the noise—he's always hosting gatherings. That's what he calls them." 

"Gatherings," Bellamy says, as the music swells briefly louder, punctuated by an excited shout. "On the Ark, we'd call that a party." 

"Yeah, that's what most of us call them down here, too." She hesitates, notices the way Bellamy seems to be peering through the windows at the outlines of shadow-people inside, then asks, "Do you want to stop in? Because I'm sure he wouldn't mind—" 

"Oh, no. No." He shoots her an embarrassed look. "If you don't mind. I'm not in the mood for a gathering." He takes an awkward step to the side, leaning heavily on the walking stick, as if to rearrange the distribution of his weight on his feet, and Clarke feels at once silly for suggesting anything but rest, and relieved, that she will not have to share him again just yet. 

"Right. Of course. I'm sure you're tired." She gestures behind him, toward the dark outline of Well's home. "You can spend the night at Wells’s place. I'd offer to let you stay with me, but—" 

"There's no way I'm climbing that ladder with an ankle that looks like a balloon," he finishes. "But—ah—are you sure it's not a problem...?" Half-turned, he looks back at the dark and empty house, surrounded by a profusion of wildflowers, a silent shadow against the encroaching thick black of the trees. Because he is not staring at her, Clarke allows a moment of sadness to pass across her face. But no more. 

"It's fine," she answers instead, infusing her voice with uncompromising purpose, slipping past him to lead the way to the door. "Wells always intended the house to be ready for guests at any time. Both he and Lincoln mostly live in their upstairs rooms, but Lincoln's downstairs space is meant for people to come and work on projects or hang out and talk or socialize or whatever. And the downstairs of Wells's house—" Talking in part to hear her own voice, to measure herself by the strength of her voice, as she follows the path of flat, uneven stones that form the walkway to the front door— "Is meant for friends who want to spend the night, because they don't feel like going back to their place, or they just want something different—" 

The door sticks slightly, swollen from the summer heat. Clarke jams it open with her shoulder, and as it pops free with a jolt, the force of the motion makes the lantern swing wildly in her hand. Bellamy reaches up to steady it, to try to steady it, with a hand over her hand. He is standing just behind her, so close that she can smell his sweat, not moving, not retreating, and she not asking him to move or to retreat. His hand warm and certain over her hand, the lantern light flashing over them, slowly settling. 

Then: "Crisis averted," Clarke says, little more than a whisper, and Bellamy clears his throat and lets his hand fall back down to his side. 

Clarke steps into the main room, slowly, agitated by the unexpectedly loud thud of her footsteps against the wooden floor. She has not been in Wells's home since the week after he left. At first, waiting for him to return, she'd spend whole nights here, sleeping in one of the spare beds with the windows open as if somehow she would be able to hear his approach, even from as far away as the ruins themselves. But after a few days this ritual became too painful, and so she closed up the house and observed it only from a distance, from above. 

Now she sets her lantern on one of the tables, drapes Bellamy's jacket over a chair, and begins methodically lighting candles, until the space is suffused with a warm, low light. 

When she's finished, she notices Bellamy still standing in the doorway, and she puts one hand on her hip and asks, with an exaggerated stern tick to her voice, “What are you doing all the way over there?" 

Bellamy raises his eyebrows, a bitten-down smile threatening at the corners of his lips. "Oh, are you going to boss me around now? I thought I was an invited guest." 

"You just don't know our Earth ways yet," Clarke answers, as she sinks down onto a soft couch beneath the window. "We're a very bossy people." 

"All of you are?" He doesn't bother to hide his grin now, limping over to her. "And here I thought it was just you." When he sits down next to her, he does not leave as much space as he could. Clarke hooks her foot around a nearby stool and pulls it over so that he can prop up his ankle, and Bellamy takes the hint. 

Well's home is a neat, well-organized, but by no means minimalist space: clusters of furniture have been carefully arranged throughout the room, as well as several work spaces, most notably Well's own personal desk, in a well-lit corner by the window overlooking his flower garden. Through a doorway in the back is a sleeping area with several spare mattresses, and a bunk bed in the corner—this, a gift from Jasper and Monty, though mostly for their own personal use. One wall is nearly completely covered by shelves, which house small artworks, artifacts from the ruins, and books. The other walls are decorated with sketches and paintings, and another stack of drawings has been left, with uncommon disorder, on the table in front of their couch. Clarke had forgotten about them, and tries now to ignore them, hoping that if she does, Bellamy will, too. 

"So, your friend," Bellamy says, now, breaking apart the comfortable silence. "Wells." He says the name hesitantly, almost uncertain, glancing at Clarke out of the corner of his eye. "He really would just—let random people stay in his house? Whenever they wanted?" 

"Within reason." She props her feet up on the edge of the table, tucks her hands in between her legs and shrugs. "But, yeah. He was generous like that. He _is_ generous like that." She knows Bellamy is staring at her more openly now, probably with pity creased across his face, which she cannot stand, not from anyone and especially not from him. Pity from the others inspires only anger in her. From Bellamy, though, it causes something more like sadness to well up, and she does not want to cry. "We grew up together as neighbors in one of the central neighborhoods and when we moved out here about a year ago, I think he was worried we'd be too isolated. And he was always used to people coming in and out of his house anyway—I think it just came naturally to him, to build an inviting and...and welcoming place." 

Her voice starts out strong, stringing together words to keep this creeping, cold, uncanny sense of loss at bay, but eventually loses force and almost breaks. Strange, she thinks, how she remembers him constantly, and yet only putting these memories to words seems to crack open the chasm between them so viscerally, how she has not really felt that he is gone until just now. Maybe it's being in his house again. Maybe it's trying to explain him to someone who's never met him. She stares down at her knees, and realizes only slowly that Bellamy is shifting next to her, moving his arm until he can drape it tentatively behind her shoulders. She feels the hesitance in the gesture, and perhaps to reassure him, perhaps because she needs the comfort and the closeness that he offers, she slides down and into the space against his side, her head butting up against his chest. He smells like old sweat and the outdoors. She can see a small hole worn into the neckline of his shirt. Once she notices it, it’s all that she can see. 

He lets his arm fall down to curl around her, and she turns inward, toward him, her knees pulled up and her feet tucked in underneath her. 

"You don't need to talk about it," Bellamy says. "I know before, at Jasper and Monty's, you didn't want to—" 

"That's because they think he's dead." 

_Dead_. Terrible, hard-edged word, which she seems to say too often now, and always in repudiation. If she's getting a reputation for obstinance and stubborn naivete, that's fine; she still won't budge. At least this declaration comes out strong and definite, not watery around the edges as she'd feared it would be. 

Bellamy doesn't answer, but she can feel the slight hitch in his breath, the brief tension in his frame. 

"They say they think it's possible he's out there,” she continues. “Lincoln, and Monty, and Jasper. But I know they don't really believe it. If they really believed, or even had hope, they wouldn't talk to me like they're trying to make me feel better..." She trails off, wipes quickly at her eyes with the back of her fist. Bellamy hugs her closer, and she understands something of the fierce rise of his emotions, by how quick this gesture of reassurance is, and how strong. 

"How long has he been gone?" Bellamy asks, this time so low that she can barely hear him. 

"A little over a month." She sniffs, waits for at least a semblance of composure to return to her. Bellamy is patient, doesn't say anything even when she lets her hand rest just above his knee. In the small, close space he has created, between his body and his arm, where she can listen to the steady rhythm of his breathing and the beat of his heart, she feels safe enough to explain what she has not yet been able to explain, not precisely, not even to herself. 

"You know, they think I just have blind faith in him, or that I'm in denial. But mostly I just know that—he _could_ disappear. The others, they think of that as something Wells would never do. But the last days before he left on his trip..." She lets out a slow, shaky breath, not letting it hitch, flicks the tip of her tongue against her bottom lip. Her mouth feels dry, and her throat burns with unshed tears. "He was—really only hanging out with me, then." Most of the candles are old and some are burning low. The one on the table in front of them is lined with thick stripes of melted wax, on top of which the orange-yellow flicker of flame dances, steady, throwing shadows on the haphazard pile of sketches and the curls and knots of the wood. "We spent most of our time in here. He wasn't sleeping well. He sketched a lot, and wrote a lot. He didn't want to talk." 

"He needed your company," Bellamy says, as if somehow he could know this, and she does not correct him because she thinks, or wants to think, that it is true. And because Bellamy's voice is low and wistful, and because afterward, he falls silent again. He waits for her to be ready to speak. 

"He'd been—um, he'd been fighting with his father. He wanted to go on another trip to the ruins, a longer trip, but his dad said he'd been spending too much time there and that it would be best to let them lie. Best not to get the whole village too involved or too interested in them—I guess that was the underlying point. And Wells just couldn't stand it. He and his dad always got along, and Wells has done so much his whole life to help the village.” She pauses, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Maybe he was just sick of it." 

"Of what?" Bellamy asks. She can almost hear the smile edging into his voice. In it, she reads a sort of affection. "Playing by the rules?" 

"Yeah. Maybe. Like I said, he wasn't talking much. But I think—there was just no more compromise between him and his dad. Or between him and... all of us. Not a lot of people cared about the ruins. Most hadn't even seen them, a few barely believed they were real. Wells hated their disinterest. Whatever he saw there, I think he... felt really alone in it." 

Yes: loneliness. That's what she'd seen in his face when he told her that she didn't understand, when he asked her to leave. She'd almost fought him. She'd wanted to yell at him and push him, knowing it would make no difference, that these empty gestures would be only capitulation or defeat. Hated the icy distance in his expression, in his voice, but knew nothing would break him. He could be as single-minded as her or even worse, and he was packing his bags, and he was going to leave. And she wasn't going to be able to stop him. Even though she understood even then that it would be a long time, perhaps a very long time, before she saw him again. 

This part is harder to explain, but Bellamy is patient. He rubs circles against her arm with his fingertips. She tells him about turning on her heel and walking out the door, not slamming it behind her because she did not even let it close, about expecting they would talk again in the morning, about finding him gone the next day. He’d left behind only a vague note on his work table, which she memorized but never showed to a soul. She talks about the days when everyone but her waited for him to return, and about the search parties that were sent out, later, and about how they found nothing, no one in the old city or anywhere around it for miles. 

And then she is quiet. Bellamy's fingers still their movements. She tries to guess what he's thinking by the bit of his profile she can see if she tilts her head just so, but he's staring at the far wall, at the carefully arranged shelves with their books and bits of ruinous scrap, and Wells's model houses arranged on the top shelf in neat rows. 

"Clarke?" he says, finally. She hears a hundred unspoken thoughts there, in the question, in her name. 

"Mmmm?" 

"Is Thelonious Wells's father?"

Funny: she'd forgotten to mention it. She allows herself a half-smile and says, "It's not a secret. Yeah.” And then, “Thelonious has been Councilor for fifteen years. Almost our whole lives. Wells has always had a lot of responsibility. I guess that's another reason I—wasn't entirely surprised—" Inexplicably, tears threaten again. She bites down hard on the inside of her cheek and curls her hand into a fist, anything to recover control, and before Bellamy can try to comfort her, she asks, "So how did you figure it out?" 

He looks for a moment as if he were not going to take this hint, a small _v_ of a frown between his brows, but then he simply sighs, and relents. "It just made sense," he answers. "Just fit together, I guess." His fingertips trace a random pattern on her arm, less a gesture of reassurance this time and more a hesitant fidgeting. Then, haltingly, the words first slow and tentative and then a single, simple rush: "When Thelonious and I were talking, he said something... Clarke, I think Wells knew." 

_Knew what?_ she could ask, but it would be an idiotic question. She stiffens, doesn't answer, and Bellamy clarifies: 

"I think he knew about the war." 

This information should shock or at least upset her, but she finds that it only settles down upon her with simple inevitability. She feels, beneath its weight, oddly without weight, distant from herself and also completely at ease. Because the idea is not shocking. Rather, it allows her to put together in a satisfying way various small scraps of memory, stray comments, hesitant half-sentences, begun and then abandoned, those evening hours when Wells would pause in his work and his gaze would become distant, and she would wonder what he was thinking and feel, more distinctly than at any previous time in her life, that she had no idea. They had always respected each other's moods and need for space and solitude, but this was different. He seemed to want to explain to her the odd frenzy of his obsession, the deep and distressing currents of his inexplicable moods, and yet he never did. He never completely could. 

"You're not upset?" Bellamy asks, and Clarke snaps back abruptly to herself, and to him, unsure of just how long her thoughts had been drifting. 

She glances up at him. "Why would I be upset? That he didn't tell me?" 

Bellamy shrugs. He would be upset, she thinks. "It's a pretty big secret to hide." 

"It is. In a way." 

"In a way?" 

Clarke sighs, and twists around in his arm so that she is sitting with her back against the couch cushions, slumped low, with her feet back up on the table and Bellamy's arm still draped around her. She moves a little closer, too, safe in the space against his side. 

"If he did know, he must have found out recently. Which would explain a lot. I think he even—he might have tried to tell me a few times, but I wasn't—" _Wasn't the sort of person he could tell. Wasn't who he needed._ "I must not have seemed receptive." 

"Clarke, I don't think you're being fair to yourself. What does that even mean, _not receptive_ —?" 

"I mean that I was the first person he brought to see the ruins, after he found them. And at first, I thought they were great. I liked visiting them, exploring, finding bits and pieces of things to take home, and I thought there was a lot of potential there. We could improve the village. I didn't know what I was looking at but I thought we could figure it out together, and learn from it, discover new inventions—" 

"Like Monty's radio experiment?" 

"Yeah." She slides down lower on the couch, rolls her head to the side and looks up at him. "But then Wells... his interest completely outstripped mine. And he became more obsessed with all of the different theories and hypotheses, and then with... with things I didn't even understand. Almost like he was looking for something specific. And I wasn't supportive. Not as much as he needed me to be. I can understand if he didn't feel like he could share everything that was weighing him down." 

Bellamy doesn't answer for a long time. She understands from the look on his face that he is considering this, that he is not completely convinced, but he's trying. 

"Maybe," he says, then, with exaggerated reluctance. 

And Clarke smiles, light, and squeezes his knee, because this half-admission is good enough. 

"You know," she says, "I think Wells would like you." 

"Really?" He sounds genuinely surprised, his eyebrows raised as he looks down at her, and Clarke almost wants to laugh. 

"Yes. Really. And not just because you're—" 

"An alien?" 

"Hilarious. From space. Because you're adventurous and you're smart—" 

"Not that smart." The words come out grumbled and half-under his breath, and she can feel him retreating into himself, away from her. 

"False modesty doesn't suit you. Yes, you fell down an embankment like a fool—" 

"You're really helping my self-esteem here, Clarke." 

"—But you also survived out there all on your own for days when you barely even know this planet. You're strong, Bellamy. And knowledgeable and brave and thoughtful and occasionally kind of funny..." 

She tries to meet his eye, but he seems uncomfortable with the praise and stares resolutely at the wall instead. This time, it is his turn to veer the subject slightly off course. "So Wells is, what, like an architect or something? Jasper said he built that weird metal house of theirs?" 

"Ah—yeah.” The word is almost lost on a long exhale. She feels herself deflating. Is it her compliments, she wonders, or her interest that he’s rejecting? She can feel an undercurrent of tension in him, and she shifts and resettles, her gaze lowering now to her hands. “And mine,” she continues, “and Lincoln's, and this one. He's been building model houses since we were kids." 

Bellamy whistles, low and impressed. Clarke is afraid he's about to say something else disparaging about himself in comparison, but instead he asks, "Is all this artwork his, too? On the walls?" 

"No. Most of it is mine, actually." She hopes that this sentence will come off nonchalant and light, that it will somehow inspire no questions and spark no curiosity. But of course it does. 

"Yours?" He gestures at the collection of paintings next to the shelves, the charcoal drawings on the back wall, the portraits by the window. "You did all this?" 

"Most," she corrects. “Most of it.” She’s always been proud of the way Wells displays her art, but in this moment the ghosts of her past creations only serve as another grim reminder: how she is lost, how those parts of her that she once assumed she could rely on through anything now seem weak and unstable, or utterly broken. She doesn’t want to talk about it. 

Bellamy seems to think that she's just being modest. "These are amazing, Clarke," he tells her, surprisingly sincere. She believes she can hear a shade of awe in his voice. And then he gestures, as she feared he would, toward the stack of sketches on the table just to the right of her foot and asks, "Are those yours too?" 

"Ah—yeah." She hesitates, then leaves the warm comfort of his embrace, pulling herself to the edge of the couch so she can reach over and drag the stack of papers to her. Is he asking because he is truly curious, she wonders, or because he wants to keep the conversation safely away from himself—and from them, whatever _them_ is starting slowly to unfurl? She could take this opportunity and move away from him. She could put a little distance between them, pretend they had not drifted for even a short time into even an approximation of intimacy. But instead she returns, curled up with her feet underneath her, to the inviting space against his side, underneath the curl of his arm, and he welcomes her back as if she had never left. His arm settles along her shoulders with a comforting weight. 

Clarke balances the sketches between them and notices that, leaning in together to look at them, they are even closer than before.

The sketches, she realizes only now, are all of the ruins. Most of them she drew on site, a few from memory. They are the last completed scenes she managed to get down, the last furious explosions of creative need before the block set in. 

She doesn't explain this, or anything else, only watches Bellamy's face as he takes in each one in turn. The thin, hardy weeds growing up through rifts in the pavement. The towering buildings, blown sideways, half-fallen in upon themselves. A study of shattered window glass, sparking in the sun. Nearly illegible street signs, store signs, brick turned fuzzy with mold, walls obscured by vegetation. An overgrowth of trees, run wild in a small park, a lush carpet of flowers forming a sea around rusty old playground parts. 

Bellamy's eyes scan without urgency over Clarke's careful pencil strokes, her subtle shading. He runs his fingertip sometimes across the sharp edge of the corner of a building or along a snaking vine as it winds its way down the page. His expression is deeply intent, a slight furrow between his brows, a narrowing of his eyes, but otherwise impossible to read, and Clarke watches him as if, with the right caliber of effort, she might somehow crack the code of him. She does not try to put herself back in the place she was when she drew these images, does not try to revisit the ruins, or the sense of awed desolation within her then, or the worry and frustration that crests now every time she picks up a graphite stick, but only watches him, and tries to see what he's seeing, or feel what he's feeling. 

"You really saw all of this?" he says, at last. His voice has a hushed quality to it that catches Clarke off guard. She listens to the fissure and crack of it when he asks, "This is all real?" and hardly hears the words themselves. He's staring at the image of the playground, which Clarke had colored in with green-yellows and deep reds and blues, and she's staring at the curl of his hair over his ear and the scattering of freckles across his cheek. 

"It's all real," she answers. She shifts a little closer, tilts her head to try to meet his eye. His arm around her tightens, briefly. 

"You know I've—I've seen a lot of pre-war images,” he says. “Even photographs from other wars. Humanity has done a lot of destroying in its history. But I've never felt..." 

"Yeah?" 

The furrow between his brows deepens. She wants to understand what he means, even leans closer, leans into him, a taut longing to know in her spine and her chest, but she knows she can't force the words from him. 

"I've never felt like this," he says. "Like it's right there. Like there's no distance at all between me and.... something so beautiful." He turns to her, so abruptly that Clarke startles, caught off guard not only by the intensity of his gaze but by the word _beautiful_ , so unexpected, in his low and uncertain voice. "Something so human, and nature taking it over again. And together it's—very moving." He seems about to say something more, then cuts himself off, a rueful smile breaking up unsaid words. His tone takes on a gruff and dismissive cast. "I doubt that even makes sense. I don't exactly know how to talk about art." 

"No, it—" She places her hand on his chest, right in the middle, curls her fingers in the fabric of his shirt. "I understand. I think." She isn't at all sure that she does, but she wants him to feel understood, not alone anymore on a planet that is only now, belatedly, his home. 

"It just makes me feel something," he says, apologetic and soft again. His other hand is resting now on her knee, and she feels herself encircled by him, close and safe and warm, too warm even in the press of summer heat, so warm that she has to force herself to remember how to breathe. "You're very talented," Bellamy's saying. He sounds like he is speaking only for the sake of speaking. She can see a shine of sweat on his forehead and nose. She feels herself sweating, feels a flush of heat on her skin. 

"Thank you," she murmurs. Her palm sliding up his chest, settling against his cheek. She's not sure if she's pulling him down or if he's leaning in but she can feel a ghost of breath on her lips— 

From outside, a loud bang of noise: a small explosion, cheering, shouting. Bellamy's up and on his feet in a moment, a blur. Clarke’s sketches are sliding to the floor, and her heart is beating a wild rhythm against her throat. 

She saves the last of her drawings as they slip from her knees, bends to pick the others up from underneath the table. Bellamy is hunched over with his hands on his knees, leaning against the arm of the couch. He winces as he shifts his weight to his uninjured foot. 

"You okay?" she asks him, as she taps the papers straight against the tabletop. Loud noises up in space, she thinks, must be a sign of danger, and that's why he's staring, embarrassed, at an indeterminate point just past her knee. "Lincoln and his friends must be having a lot of fun out there." 

"Yeah. Yeah." He hitches himself backward and perches lightly on the arm of the couch. "I guess so. I'm fine." He glances over to her, just out of the corner of his eye, but it's something. "Sorry about—" 

"No, it's okay." She sets her sketches in a neat pile and then, not sure what to do with her hands, rubs them down along her legs and to her knees. Little more than an excuse to wipe the sweat from her palms. "Do you want to—maybe head over and see what's going on—?" 

"Not really." 

There, a slight smile, at least. Clarke manages a small smile of her own in return. The pleasant warmth on her cheeks is now a bright, hot burning, a residual embarrassment that, she tells herself, has no cause. They were on the same page; she knows that they were. And yet Bellamy won't meet her eye, like he's ashamed, like he's battling down a great surge of regret. Like he was only caught up in a moment, one he wishes had never fallen for. 

So when he adds, "But—I wouldn't mind stepping outside for a few minutes," Clarke nods, and gets shakily to her feet. 

"Some fresh air," she agrees. "Might be good." 

She leads the way to the front door, listening to the sound of Bellamy's even footsteps, interrupted at regular intervals by the sound of his walking stick, following behind. Outside and across the clearing, the party is still raging. The yard around Lincoln's house is lit with several torches, and the crowd has surged out from the downstairs rooms and the porch and taken to dancing in the dirt and grass. Upbeat rhythms flow from inside the house, fill the air, disrupt the night sounds of the forest, but they’re faint enough by the time they reach Wells's house that Clarke can still think, that she and Bellamy can still talk, if they want to. 

"So can I ask you something?" he says, as he closes the door behind him. Clarke is just sitting down on the top step leading up to the porch. Bellamy follows, lowering himself with more difficulty and stretching his ankle out in front of him. 

"Sure. Anything." 

"You and Wells. Are you—? Is he—? Are you together?" 

Clarke listens to him sputter out the question, making no effort to spare him the misery of finding the right words, only crossing her arms on top of her knees and ducking her head down to hide her smile. Bellamy is undoubtedly cute when he's awkward. Not that he would appreciate the observation. She wonders how long he's been sitting on this question, if it explains at least some of the panic in his eyes when he shot up from the couch. 

"Are Wells and I a couple?" she repeats. The words come out strangled, broken up by laughter barely restrained. 

"Yeah." Almost insulted now. To him, of course, it is not a ridiculous question. 

"We're not." She turns to look at him, pleased at the obvious relief on his face. "We're friends. Best friends, our whole lives. We did... experiment a little, when we were about fourteen. Dated for a bit. I guess that was inevitable." She hears a new softness to her own voice, seeping in despite herself, a corresponding fondness to the expression on Bellamy's face. "I thought I was madly in love, at the time. And it was wonderful. For a few weeks. Then awkward. Then terrible. Then we figured out we're really... we’re not meant for each other that way. It’s more like we're family." 

"That's not nothing," Bellamy murmurs, such an understatement, and said so faintly, with such distance, that Clarke almost has to laugh. 

"It's the whole world," she answers, and Bellamy ducks his head. "So—hey—" She leans in closer, letting her arm bump against his and her knee hit his leg. "Why do you ask?" 

He rolls his eyes, huffs out a disbelieving breath through his nose. "Why do you think?" 

"Okay—why didn't you ask _sooner_?" 

_Like before we almost kissed in my best friend's house?_

Bellamy shrugs. He's still not meeting her eye, staring instead down at his ankle, a spot in the dirt just beyond. "There was never a good time. I didn't want you to think that I—" 

"Had a specific answer in mind?" 

She's let her hand rest on his arm. The corner of his mouth tilts up, a half smile, a sense of relief in his exhale and the curving of his shoulders. “Yeah, something like that.” 

He reaches over and picks a flower from the profusion next to the house, its petals so sharply yellow that they seem to glow in the moonlight, and leans in to tuck it gently behind her ear. His fingertips graze her skin, and although she is still warm, still pink-cheeked and blushing, nevertheless she feels a pleasant shiver run along her spine. She can hear the party, see the lights and the crowd out of the corner of her eye, but none of it seems real. What is real is Bellamy's leg against her knee, his arm pressed against her arm. The way he looks at her, sweetly, quietly, without hurry, as if he could continue staring at her just like this for the rest of his life. 

He's slid his hand over her hand, not quite holding it but swallowing it up beneath his palm. A gentleness to this touch, too. 

Then he interrupts the moment with words that are a bit too loud, designed, perhaps, to break apart this slowly swelling feeling, the way they are inching toward each other again: 

"Hey, you know, maybe if I stay, I can learn how to do one of those fancy flower arrangements I saw earlier." He adjusts the flower behind her ear slightly. "Maybe I have a hidden talent." 

"I'm sure you have many hidden talents. Does that mean you are going to stay?" 

The word _if_ reverberates out louder than the rest. She puts her other hand on top of his, as if to hold him back from flight. 

He opens his mouth, closes it again, guilt shading over his features and making him drop his gaze from hers. "No. I can't. I left Alpha Station to find my sister and that's—she's my family. She's the only family I have left. If there's any chance that she's out there, I need to keep looking." 

Clarke nods slowly. Disappointment is the feeling settling down in her gut, but she hardly notices it, because a hard and certain resolve is steeling through the rest of her. "Then I'll go with you," she says. 

"Clarke—no, I can't ask—" 

"You're not asking. I'm volunteering. I know this area better than you do, and with a horse from the village we can cover a lot more ground than on foot. It just makes sense. And anyway—" How to explain? How to explain when she does not quite understand this feeling herself, when Bellamy is staring at her with such uncertainty, that apologetic, guilty look still on his face? 

"I want to," she says. "I want to—I need to feel like I'm doing something. Like I'm accomplishing something. I'm tired of just sitting here feeling useless." 

_I'm tired of looking for someone who can't be found, who doesn't want to be found._

"You're not useless. You've already done more for me than... than anyone's done in a long time." 

A rueful confession, his hand holding on tightly to hers. She leans in closer, takes her hand from on top of his and rests it against his cheek, encouraging him to lean in closer until their foreheads touch. She cannot look at him from this distance, so she lets her eyelids close. 

"I think I need this, Bellamy. And—" She swipes her thumb across his cheek, feels how it is rough with stubble. "And anyway, I've already grown a bit fond of you." 

"Just a bit?" 

She hears the smile in his voice. She wants to be closer; she wants to wrap herself up in him again. 

"Just the smallest bit," she answers, or tries to. The last syllables get lost on the breath's edge before their lips meet. A kiss at first tentative, then gaining certainty, until she feels like she is melting into him, breathing in sync with him, tuned precisely to him. He wraps an arm around her waist, and her fingers stretch up and into his hair, gripping his curls, and yet even this movement holds no more than a hint of roughness, and all the rest is soft and unhurried and sweet, simple and good. 

So good, so very good and right, that the very pleasure of their meeting seems to set off bursts of light in the night sky. She sees the flash, bright behind her closed eyes. Hears a distant whoosh from high above. 

Then gasps, and shouts, someone yelling for the others to come outside. 

She and Bellamy break apart, tilt their heads back at the same moment and see them: burning fire above them, unnatural fluorescent red streaks across the sky. Clarke has never seen anything so strange, so alien in her whole life. 

“What—what is that—?” 

Bellamy is shaking his head, staring up in amazement, his features sharp in the red glow that fills the clearing, and radiating something, something just beyond the tip of her tongue—something like hope. 

“Flares,” he answers. “From the Ark. Another Station made it to the ground.” 


End file.
